I collect old microphones and I came across this interesting stereo mic on a collector’s website. It is designed to give accurate stereo recordings by making the mic into the form of a human head with realistically shaped ears for the receiving sections.
Of course, it is a dumb idea, but beautifully implemented
“The KU 100 is a human head replica with microphones inside of the ears. It is used for binaural pick-up to create the most realistic stereo recordings. This third-generation design is loudspeaker compatible, and accurately reproduces ambient acoustics with information about distance, direction, and perspective. It offers exceptional speech intelligibility in noisy environments. Applications for the KU 100 include radio drama, special effects for film, outdoor nature recordings, acoustic evaluation, and scientific research. The KU 100 package includes the head, IC 5 (10 meter) extension cable, AC 20 adapter cable, internal battery supply, external AC power supply unit and aluminum carrying case. The microphone can be powered by external phantom power or by an internal battery supply. Thus, remote location recording is possible with only a minimum of extra accessories.”
Erica spent a good chunk of her childhood on roller skates cruising the sidewalks of the New York’s East Village. She was very disappointed when they moved up to the burbs and there were no sidewalks and the roads were covered with tarred gravel. I bet there was a time when I could have talked her into trying out for the Roller Derby. They are having tryouts this September.
I’ve often thought of shanghaiing my brother Larry and cousin Bob and going down to Yonkers to watch a match. I am a little concerned because Yonkers has so many really bad neighborhoods. I think it would be fun, but I’d insist on taking Larry’s car.
There are a bunch of funny stories about the art on this North Broadway storefront. John B. met the artist in a bar in Nyack and wanted her to come to poker. She was all for it, except Jim didn’t want any 20 somethings at the poker table. My mother had some strong opinions about the paint job, as did my aunts.
I, for one, would have liked some new blood (and money) at the poker table. I am not that impressed with the art work, but I think that the village overreacted. The whole situation is much more 1969 than 2009.
John Shirley is one of my favorite writers. I just finished his latest book Bleak History.
Bleak History is a fantasy novel that has its roots in SF type fantasy such a Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and Heinlein’s Magic Incorporated. Bleak History has quite a bit in common Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos books. It has that sense of wonder that is characteristic of the best Science Fiction, and it will sit on my bookshelf with the books that I will read again and again.
I am now aware that the current dropdown menu has issues where the underlying elements bleed through and prevent the menu from being clicked. It works great in firefox, but is deadly in IE7. I am tempted to upgrade to IE8, but that is not a good solution.
I apologize to visitors who are having a hard time with it. At various times today, as I get a chance to work on it, you may see the entire site broken.
I have a Google alert on my name. Every time Keith Graham comes up in the news I get an email. There are rugby players, hairdressers, even a web page designer that share my name.
One Keith Graham writes for newspapers in and around Atlanta. I saw the title Reasons to Oppose Health Care Reform in a news page called “Like the Dew, A Journal of Southern Culture and Politics”, and I figured that some Keith was disgracing the name. Then I read the article. The article is 10 really dumb reasons to avoid health care reform:
1) You are so rich and so sure that you always will be that you don’t even need medical insurance.
and 9 others.
I like the last one:
10) You think voting against your best interest is cool.
If you read the article, make sure you read the discussion at the end – they are very good. The anti-health care factions all sound like they wear tin foil hats.
Well, I’ll let this guy into the brotherhood of Keith Grahams. He did a good job, except for the misleading headline, but that was meant to be ironic, and we Americans, as is often said, have trouble with irony.
About the author (the other) Keith Graham (not me): (this other) Keith Graham lives in Atlanta most of the time and on St. Simons Island on Georgia’s coast the rest. Like so many Southerners, Keith was named for a blind piano player, who is now little remembered, and he spent his earliest years living with his parents in the back rooms of a small-town Georgia radio station. Later, he moved to several other states, including North Carolina twice, before returning to Georgia. He has worked for a series of newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal and Constitution from 1979 to 2007.
A friend of mine joined facebook because his significant other is gravely ill with cancer. He uses his wall to keep friends and family informed. It is very sad. He moved her into a hospice last week and then married her in a bedside ceremony. They have been living together for about 30 years, but they decided to make it official.
At first, I thought that it was not a good idea to make things so public, but I think it saves him from having to repeat sad news to dozens of people, and so makes a hard time a little easier. I am painfully aware that I have no idea how to express something comforting. I am very afraid that I will do or say something wrong (even this post is probably a bad idea). He is mostly an internet acquaintance and I’ve only met him a few times face to face, but we have many good friends in common. I met his wife once at a Blues concert.
I made some changes to the home page and the blog. My intent was to improve the navigation. Of course, I wound up changing the wrong elements and, as of 10 minutes ago, the blog is totally screwed. Since the blog is so big it takes 15 minutes to republish it and any mistakes I make are bound to be seen by a few people.
My weeks of traffic glory are now over. Stumbleupon no longer sends me traffic and the BoingBoing link is not sending any new surfers. Inexplicably my Google Page Rank is now down to 1 on the blog and 3 on the home site. This makes no sense unless I somehow offended the Google Gods. I am worried that my eBay pages, which make a good chunk of money, have somehow polluted the site.
My traffic is back to pre-stumbleupon rates plus about 30%. Gone are the days of 1,500+ viewers a day. I’m back to normal. I did notice that people explore more of the site, which is nice. The average person is looking at 4 or more pages, and that is phenomenal.
The reason that I redid the navigation menus is that I want to see this trend of surfers actually reading pages keep going up.
Hunter S. Thompson is still my most popular entry. My Joke-a-day blog is somehow getting hits, even though it is experimental and I never linked to it. Next is the clich� page. A surprise hit are the blog entries about my poker buddy Jim’s kid Stella Maeve who is an actress and is surprising everyone with her performance in The Runaways.
I just checked and the pages seem unbroken and the menus work again. Any ideas for improving the navigation would be appreciated.
I finished about 100 pages of John Shirley’s Bleak History last Friday and the book is in the truck calling to me. Shirley reaches right out and grabs you with this one. The only good thing about going to work on Monday is that I can read Bleak History for 45 minutes on the bus.
This is a good one, and no you can’t have it when I’m done. Buy your own.
Erica does some fancy stitching. She mixes up some modern stuff with very complex reproductions of needlecraft from 300 years ago. She sent me this site that she noticed because I blogged Lovecraft’s birthday yesterday.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born this day August 20, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island.
H.P. Lovecraft is the most influential horror writer of the 20th century. Much of modern fantasy, horror and even Science Fiction can be traced directly to his stories, essays and letters.
He has influenced many writers including Stephen King, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. Dozens of films have been made based on his stories. Many modern graphic novels, especially Batman, include Lovecraft themes.
Lovecraft was a strange man in many ways and is often condemned for the casual racism, sexism, and religious bigotry that appeared occasionally in his stories. I would suggest that he was a product of his times and environment. You should forgive these references when they pop up in his works. Being a recluse, he had a distorted view of the greater world and had little opportunity to learn he was mistaken.
Good quote from Lovecraft: My household consisted of seven servants and nine cats, of which latter species I am particularly fond.
I received 13 critiques from critters.org of my short story “The Perfect Gold”. I used this story as a barometer of how the critiques might help me because it was one of the first stories I wrote after a 35 year hiatus. I wrote it early in 2003 and it appeared online in Atsoise (now defunct) in February of 2004. It had 5 rejections before it was accepted and I believe that this is because of my ignorance of how editors expected a story to be written.
I made lots of mistakes in “The Perfect Gold”. I was trying to write in a fairly remote omniscient viewpoint, which is an older style and not acceptable today. Currently, editors want a tight personal viewpoint, almost first person (but they don’t like first person). Another mistake was that I had a break in the middle of the story where the main character leaves the scene to get something, but it chops off the flow until the character returns. In another break I spend some time describing the background and history of one of the characters, almost as though it were a footnote, and this disrupts the narrative. I had lots of trouble with the language. My words flow a little smoother now, but I remember at the time that I was concerned that the sentences seemed like lines from a technical manual with lots of “she did this” and “then he did this”. This computer programmer approach to narrative has been somewhat abated, but I still tend to write in syllogisms.
The critiques I received were of different kinds. One had an attached word document that cannot be opened due to viruses. Four were people who told me that they really enjoyed the story and went on to tell me their favorite parts (useless other than for moral building). Three people hated the story or thought it was boring. It seems that I wrote a “mood” piece. The people that did not like the story wanted less emotion and more blood and guts. The story has an emotional impact, but it is not an O Henry type story with a twist or revelation at the end (I wanted to write a story like “The Dead” by Joyce).
About three quarters of the critiques had valid remarks. They found numerous typos that I did not see. They complained about the narrative breaks that interrupted the flow. Many complained about my short choppy declarative sentences. I am almost tempted to rewrite the story, give it different title and try to resell it as new. I’ve done this with other stories, but right now I have new ideas, and I have dozens of stories that I have yet to write before I rehash older stuff.
The critters experience has been a good one overall. When I first started writing, I would not have found it useful because I would have disagreed with some of the conclusions. My attitude today is that most editors have had their souls corrupted by the Clarion brainwashing and there is nothing I can do about it. The Clarion workshops have created a static standard that renders classic short stories by Bradbury, Clarke, and Heinlein as “bad”. If I am to publish stories, they must fit into the little box created by advocates of Clarion and the Turkey City Lexicon.
Now that I have been through the critters process, I will be leaving the group. I was going to put my stories “Carnivale of Blood”, “Nigerian Soul”, and “The Reefs of Jupiter” through the process, but it takes too long for too little. In order to get a critique you have to submit 10 critiques, which I find stressful, and then wait 45 days. I’d have to wait four and a half months to get a three stories critiqued, and I usually write one or two stories each month.
I was thinking about hijacking the process in order to speed things up by using four or five different emails and writing a critique a week for all of them, but this would be too much like work. I am far from the right person to criticize a story (pot calling kettle…). I didn’t like most of the stories that I critiqued so it was hard being diplomatic.
I will have to prevail on family and friends to edit my stories. I just don’t see my typos, grammar and syntax mistakes. This would have been a good use for critters, but I don’t have the patience.
I signed up with Del Rey books to get review copies of their books. So far I haven’t received anything.
Are you regular blogger and avid reader of science fiction, fantasy, horror, movie, and gaming books? Sign-up for our mailing list and you’ll be eligible to receive advance copies of Del Rey Books. Your blog may be featured in a future issue of the Del Rey Internet Newsletter.
Andrew Burt has started up a non-profit “Green” page where he is collecting information and promoting Green Initiatives. By a strange coincidence one of my main jobs for the last couple of months has been to provide programming support for the Westchester County Green initiative (the ugly web pages are mine. They are prototypes that went into immediate production).
I’ve had to start catching up with book reviews. I read a couple more of the John Brunner Books, one is OK the other great. I read a signed copy of Lewis Shiner’s Frontera and I finished a Robert B. Parker novel Pastime, a Spenser mystery (like most Parkers, very good, but I won’t review it). I also read about half of a Damon Runyon book and listened to a few short stories.
This is the sixth anniversary of this blog. This is the 1,711th blog entry.
If each blog entry averages 200 words then that’s 34,000 words. Enough, with pictures, to make a fairly thick book. It’s a good thing I don’t have to try to sell it.
I’ve written about cats, bees, technology, writing, publishing and every fool thing that crosses my mind.
Justine, by far, is the reader who has commented the most, followed by E. Jim. John B. is the only one of my friends who ever reads the blog, at least he is the only one who admits it.
The most popular post is one about Hunter S. Thompson. I don’t know why this should be true.
I’ve been BoingBoinged twice, but the last one was a total bust.
My Technorati Authority is 6 with a rank of 523,728 – lame.
My Alexa rank is 926,353, but Alexa is mostly meaningless.
My Google page rank is 4, which is not bad.
I have 9,666 Yahoo back links which is pretty good.
My Compete Rank is 338,974
The Quantcast rank is 203,198. Quantcast informs me that my readers are Male, Middle Aged, Caucasian, No kids in house, Less Affluent, and Graduates and Post Graduates. Hey that’s me!
My server logs say that I get about 50,100 unique visitors a month – averaging 1,621 a day. I get on the average 3,939 raw hits per day (images and files as well as pages).
I have been using biological technology in short stories for about 7 years now and I have thought that the next revolution in cybernetics would be an organic one for at least 20 years.
IBM announced today that it has demonstrated using “DNA origami” to create biological cybernetic structures that are analogous to silicon based semiconductors. The advantages of using DNA are the very small scale, and the low cost of production. DNA is a substance that copies information naturally with very little encouragement. It is stable of long periods of time and it is easy to create.
A cubic centimeter of DNA has the potential to store 10 terabytes of data.*
I will guess, though, that speed of access will be an issue. Sending in messenger RNA to query DNA data stored in nucleic acid bonds will be very slow. The announcement sort of hinted that data had been stored, but failed to mention if it “write only memory” or if the data could be retrieved in a reasonable time.
I always felt that biological memory systems would be large arrays of crystalline proteins with metallic bonds that could be directly attached to leads and generate micro-voltages. These would be generally as dense, but would incorporate logical structures such as nor gates that could be used to directly access parts of the crystal at nanosecond speeds, or even provide computational functions.
*(data density of DNA, from a Google search, is 1 bit per cubic nanometer. A nanometer is 10^-9. A cubic meter then is 10^18 bits. A CC is 1/10,000 cubic meters so a CC is 10^14 bits or about (with parity & checks) about 10^13 bytes = 10 terabytes.)
I get weird spam. In one message I found this list of places to market your novel, get reviewed, write reviews, etc.
Some of these I’ve heard of, but most I haven’t. I know a few novelists read this blog from time to time so I copied the list. (I took out the links to the spam site, thank you).
I got back three critiques from critters. They are not as awful as I thought, but the criticisms seem to center around grammar and my sentence structure. I like to write in short declarative sentences. Nobody likes this. The readers would be happy if I made longer sentences with a few dependent phrases springing up here and there, bringing some counterpoint to the rhythm. Sorry, no can do. I suffer from the Hemingway syndrome of chopping sentences.
One critique did a good job at finding the typos. One critique had never heard of Flowers of Sulfur. One mistook my statement that I had never done this before to mean write stories when I meant use critters.
Seven League Boots, it turns out are not only an element of European folklore, but a comic element in a Terry Pratchett novel, which renders them unusable ever again as a metaphore.
There was a criticism that there should be another character in the story, but I can’t do that without writing a different story.
One reader was complaining that I was using passive tense.
So my verdict on critters? It’s good for typos and grammar, Ok for minor stylistic elements, mostly useless for structure and logic. Critquers may be good writers, themselves, but seem to lack any depth – probably very young. I don’t think that they will “get” the stories that I write because they are very different from what these readers expect.
The worst thing about critters, though is that it takes a month after you submit to get a story back. I am way too impatient to write a story and then wait for a month, revise it, and then submit it to a venue and then wait for two months for a rejection. I’d rather get the rejection right away.
Back in the real world: I got a story back from Future Fire with a form reject, and the Nigerian story went out to AtomJack. I don’t know where the Nigerian story belongs, but Atomjack bought another story from me that I thought was a hard sell. The lossy compression story I got back may never find a home. I will see if there is anything I can do to make it comprehensible and mail it off to the next sucker on the list.
Update 8/14/2009 – So far 5 critiques and they ALL don’t like the way the sentences are structured. I started looking for a book on style, but none seem to address this topic.
It has been about 45 days since I sent out the last batch of stories. I have three left out that have not yet been rejected so I am getting antsy. SH, by my stats, sends out rejects on Thursdays, so tomorrow I will have a pretty good story with one reject attached to it and I’ll need a new place to send it. The other two stories are dogs and I’ll probably re-trunk them.
There was a note on the Heinlein website that they would announce (over a year late) the winners of their story contest in August. I wish I had entered a stronger story, but all the good ones have been published.
I wrote a new story yesterday afternoon that I like. I have been reading Damon Runyan on the bus and wrote a Runyonesque story, but it uses a Nigerian setting rather than New York (very odd humorous story about 419 scammers). It is a good story, but I have no idea where it would fit in. It will sit on my disk a while. It is neither action packed or dark so there are precious few places to send it.
I calculated that F&SF gets upwards to 10,000 submissions a year in its slush pile and accepts only a couple of these stories that whole time. The other pro markets show similar if not worse stats. I have to think outside the box and find a good home for my stories outside the usual markets.
My critters submission is now up and I expect that I will be receiving some crits on it soon. The quality and nature of the critiques will determine if I wish to continue with them.
I am a Spec-Fic outsider. When I read the current pro zines all I can do is scratch my head and wonder about the decision making process that resulted in such uninteresting stories getting published. I don’t get worked up about it because I have several thousand books and magazines from the 1940s and 1950s that I have yet to read.
Steve Davidson at the Crotchety Old Fan blog does get worked up about it. He has read the Hugo nominated novels and stories and has declared them pretty much schlock. In a series of articles he has described the flaws in the Hugo Awards process as well as the weaknesses in the system. He has proposed that the outsider fan base take back the Hugo Awards.
The actual Hugo nomination and final voting figures are so low that a very small number of new voters who choose to vote in a block could very likely control some of the spots on the ballot and maybe even the final award. All it takes is signing up at the Aussiecon site as a supporting member ($50 US or CA) and voting. Even if you don’t vote in a block (which I am not yet endorsing), your vote can really make a difference.
Here’s how Steve puts it on his blog:
For my fifty dollars (which is, right now, the equivalent of about 16 gallons of gasoline, or 7 packs of cigarettes, or a half-way decent bag of that funny stuff, or maybe two feature films for the wife and I, in other words HARDLY ANYTHING) I not only:
get the right to nominate
get the right to vote on the final selection
receive all of the wonderful printed matter produced by the Worldcon
convert my membership to attending (with no premium fee)
AND
receive the voter’s packet (presuming that folks don’t go all wonky and suddenly decide to discontinue a WILDLY successful program, the chances of which are about .0000000000000000000001 percent) which has comprised in past years a collection of literature that would cost me far more out of pocket than a measly fifty bucks. (Approximately, but actually more than, twice that supporting membership fee; hardbacks are running about $24.95 average now. Purchasing the five short list novel contenders would therefore run about $125. I save (YOU save) $75 out of your book allowance for the year.)
But that’s not the BEST part.
HERE is the best part.
I want all of the rest of you to do the same, because if I can get a decent amount of you to do it – we can ROCK THE HUGO VOTE!
I watched the Hugo Awards on Twitter – it was not very satisfying. I don’t know personally any of the nominees, and I had not read any of the nominated works. I usually read classic SF, so I had not even read any of the nominated authors, except a couple of stories by Gaiman that I have as MP3 files.
The Hugos, were interesting and there was a certain contact high from reading the tweets from the ceremonies. I decided that I should pay more attention this year.
If you spend $50 right now (it goes up over the months) you can become a supporting member of the Australian Worldcon. This is not a ticket to attend the con, but it does allow you to nominate and vote for next year’s Hugo awards. More important, the $50 gets the finalist’s books mailed to you so you can decide on who to vote for (see disclaimer below). You get about $125 worth of new books and magazines for your $50, plus the right to vote for the ones you liked. I think this is a good deal.
Still, $50 is a bit pricey. I already have enough 50 year old books, but I am looking to read some new stuff – to cleanse my palate so to speak. I am going to sleep on this, but I may just send them the money.
Disclaimer – I just read the following comment: The voter package is an initiative that has been run by John Scalzi for the past two years. While we are all very grateful to John for what he has done, there is no guarantee that we will want to put in the same amount of work next year. While Kevin and I will do everything we can to encourage it, there is no guarantee that it will happen again next year, so please don’t advertise it as such.
I am of the opinion that the book publishers will send out books to the Hugo voters if John Scalzi does not. It would make sense to have the voting members have access to the book, and I am sure a Hugo logo will help a book’s sales.
I picked up a package of tapes by Rick Roderick about 20th Century philosophy for a quarter at a garage sale. It was fun. Roderick has a broad West Texas accent and frequently jokes about being overweight and smoking. Unfortunately, he died of heart failure when he was 52, which make his comments sad.
The tapes start with Heidegger and move through several 20th century thinkers including Sartre and ends with Derrida and Baudrillard. This was all new to me. I knew Heidegger and Sartre through existentialism, but 90% of the content was new ideas. I am not usually concerned with “logic choppers” as Roderick calls philosophers.
Roderick sums up thousands of pages of philosophy in a few cute phrases. The four tapes cover a huge amount of ground with about 45 minutes spent on each of the philosophers and their ideas.
My favorite notion was one by Baudrillard that claimed that Reality is simulation. That we cannot understand the real unless it is simulated. This is a very cyberpunk notion and it also might indicate that computer simulations have just as much a claim on reality as do our only internal simulations based on sensory input.
This was issued by the Learning Company, but is no longer available. If you are lucky enough to come across it, I would highly recommend listening. There is also a video version, but I don’t think that you lose much with just the audio. Pictures above are Rick from the video version.
Rick Roderick – Self Under Siege – Philosophy in the 20th Century (1983)
It is available at eBay, but for much more than 25¢.
I often brag that I create some of the ugliest websites on the web. Today I received a comment that said, “Didn’t explore site because it’s one of the worst looking websites I’ve ever seen.”
I wonder how many people don’t use this site because it is ugly. I personally don’t believe that it is really ugly, just unconventional. I purposely try to make my site memorably different so that it will make an impression.
I don’t think that the presentation in communication is tightly coupled with a reader’s reaction to the content unless the presentation gets in the way of the content.
My site is different, unexpected, and challenging. I have been considering changing the template for a while, but all of my ideas would make the site even more different, unexpected and challenging.
The current template is about 4 years old, and is based on the original template that is more than ten years old. Perhaps I should make a few test templates and let people vote.
To the person who had to leave the site because their own fragile expectations of what a blog should be were challenged, I am sorry. There are worse things in the world than ugly yellow on black web pages, far worse. I hope you can avoid those things as easily as clicking a red x.
My Dad and Uncles used to talk about their wives after a few beers – the three Hunt Witches. They are not really witches (after all one is my Mother and another my Godmother). They have all outlived their husbands and Connie is over 90 now and has to use a walker. Ethel (88) took a flight from Florida and rented a car at the airport and drove 40 miles to Nyack. My brother took us all out to Dinner last night and I got a picture of them.
Those old ladies cleaned their plates, even with those large servings at Charlie Brown’s. They each had a large dessert. They then filled their pocketbooks with bread and goodies (they all brought plastic bags).
I give you Connie, Ethel, and Martha – the Hunt sisters.
I collect old microphones and I came across this interesting stereo mic on a collector’s website. It is designed to give accurate stereo recordings by making the mic into the form of a human head with realistically shaped ears for the receiving sections.
Erica spent a good chunk of her childhood on roller skates cruising the sidewalks of the New York’s East Village. She was very disappointed when they moved up to the burbs and there were no sidewalks and the roads were covered with tarred gravel. I bet there was a time when I could have talked her into trying out for the Roller Derby. They are having tryouts this September.
John Shirley is one of my favorite writers. I just finished his latest book 
I have a Google alert on my name. Every time Keith Graham comes up in the news I get an email. There are rugby players, hairdressers, even a web page designer that share my name.
Nebula Alert is a good space yarn with a nautical flavor.
Before IBM marketed their Thinkpad line of computer notebooks they used to give out these “Think Pads” to their employees and customers.
