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

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

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

from the Juno Books guidelines:

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

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

Juno Books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(My dingy cubicle resounds with fiendish laughter.).

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

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

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

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

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

Grace Hopper’s Notebook showing the first computer bug.

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

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

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

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

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

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

via Pinchbottom: Naked Girls Reading.

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

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

Samantha’s Jewlery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no Trek on TV that I can find.

This is the long cold teatime of my soul.

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

Gag me with a spoon.

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

I will not be watching the next movie.

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

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

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

My brother Larry and my friend Carlos never met a link they didn’t like. The latest thing is a warning message that comes up tells them their computer is under attack by a virus and they have to install the virus software to fight it. Naturally they comply and their machines are now zombies controlled by eastern European spammers. They both fell for the same scam.

They had Norton Antivirus and AdAware, but the malware seems to bypass these. I spent two hours last night on Larry’s machine reloading stuff and running in “diagnostic mode”, but I am not sure that I got rid of everything. I think I will format his disk and reinstall everything. It doesn’t help that Larry’s machine is some ancient piece of junk that he bought at a garage sale when the owners convinced him it was a great machine. Anything available at a garage sale for $10 is not a good computer.

I had a spare machine, but it crashed. It was a Dell XPS that Justine sent me, but it arrived all crunched and broken because the Fed-ex drivers played kick-soccer with it. I taped it back together, but the fans did not work right and it eventually over heated. I am slowly building a new machine out of parts, but it is not ready. I can’t afford to spend much, so critical parts are waiting for me to sell things on eBay.

There’s a contest run by Aussicon (this year’s Worldcon) for a spec-fic short story that includes an Australian place, and uses the phrase “make ready”.

I guess you could retrofit a story to include these things, but the limit is 1500 words. It’s almost impossible to write a good short story in 1500 words (unless you are O Henry. Shinichi Hoshi, or Arthur C. Clarke).

AussieCon4 :: Short Story Competition.

It is the allure of flannel sheets that brings these two together. The truth is that Ollie is jealous of Max and follows him around. They can usually be found in the choice cat resting places, snuggling together.

Here is an album of a few shots from last Wednesday’s blizzard.

We’ve had a medical crisis here. Willy, our oldest cat, had a urinary blockage and needed immediate medical intervention. We wound up driving him down to the Oradell animal hospital where he underwent a procedure to reroute his urethra. This is a PU, and is quite unpleasant. Willy is doing better now and has to take a ton of medicine. Anyone who has had to pill a cat knows how hard this can be.

The trip was in the middle of the horrible snow storm that dropped a foot or so of snow on the area. I’ll blog some pictures.

In the mean time, princess Gracie has decided that the new lace curtains and the new paint on the walls around her window seat suit her well.

One person started following me on Google Buzz. As near as I can make out, this person who I don’t know, might be a young lady from Oklahoma City. I assume that I was followed in error, so I blocked her. I hope that she is not insulted.

The privacy issues of thinks like Facebook and Buzz are a Pandora’s box of potential trouble. I don’t see a box that I can check off that prevents people from looking at my profile without my permission.

If I get many unknowns following me, I will have to take my Google profile private.

This is from the Forrest J. Ackerman estate. Forrey was a literary agent for a while and they’ve been selling stuff from the Garage Mahal.

Robert A. Heinlein’s wives also acted as editors, and Leslyn MacDonald also was supposed to have been a writer. How much of this story is Leslyn is unknown. My thinking is that she wrote this after she divorced Heinlein in 1947, and 4E was not an active agent until later in the 1950s.

$2,999.95 buy-it-now is way too high, especially since it does not come with any publication rights.

This is a corrected copy that was probably retyped before it was shipped out to markets. It never sold, as far as my Googling can tell.

Take a look at the first page.

4E ACKERMAN: ROBERT HEINLEIN’S WIFE LESLYN MACDONALD MS – eBay (item 310200380728 end time Mar-14-10 07:30:10 PDT).

I saw I was receiving a lot of traffic from a discussion on reddit.com. Someone did an actual screen capture from Google that had suggestions for a partially filled out search string. It was a funny accident. Someone on reddit linked to my bee blog post What is a Bee Nuc?

On eBay there is an old fanzine that includes a very very short story by Ray Bradbury.

There was a discussion over at IMdb, which is a database of movies. Someone mentioned my Laws of SF and I got trashed. I base my opinions of what makes good SF from 50 years of reading. Most people get all of their knowledge of SF from watching Dr. Who or Star Wars.

Here are some of the things they said about me:

What moron wrote that: “Star Trek and Star Wars…they are beyond judgment and criticism”.

Why is some tossers blog the be all and end all of science fiction writing ?

Never ceases to amaze me how people can just pull bullsh!t out of their arses with such a serious, matter-of-fact tone. It’s like some kind of magic trick.

Silliest thing i have heard in a long time

IMDb :: Boards :: Avatar (2009) :: 10 Laws of Good Science Fiction (How ma….

Sort of like Facebook and Twitter, but using the gmail interface.

I would like to not use Facebook, but I like the games with J, and I like reading John Shirley’s rants.

I gave up on twitter. Nothing important can be said in 140 characters. I routinely deny requests to be followed.

Google buzz might be better because it is tightly integrated with tools that I use now such as Picasa, Youtube, Gmail and Blogs.

It would be nice if they had a widget API interface like Wordpress or Facebook.

Keith Graham – Google Profile.

When I started blogging I used Blogger.com because it was the easiest way to start a blog. I quickly added several blogs and  converted existing sites to blogger. This was a simple process because blogger supported FTP publishing. This allowed me to use blogger, but have the pages on my own domain. I did this with this blog, Jt30.com, Harpamps.com, Too Many Damn Cats, and Bee Progress. I have since been slowly converting these to wordpress sites.

Wordpress gave me much greater control over the site and all of the pages. It also allowed me to optimize the sites for search engines and I am now getting twice the number of hits in some places.

A few of my blogs still need to be converted. This is now important because Blogger has stopped support of FTP publishing. If I want to post to a blog and have it appear on my domain I must either convert to Wordpress or other content management software or point my site to blogger. If I point my site to blogger I lose all of my ability to create and publish pages separate from the blog.

I start today converting Harpamps to Wordpress. This is a large site with several hundred pages of amplifier information, and will take a month to convert. I will also have to convert all of JT30.com. I started with jt30.com, but never finished. Lots of work to do.

Erica and I watched the film Moon tonight. This is a good little movie that chooses an interesting thoughtful plot over flash and special effects. It is good hard SF and will be the movies that I nominate for a Hugo award. The only problem was that there were long periods of time where the pacing was a little slow. I particularly liked the use of models instead of computer graphics. CGI effects still look fake compared to a well done model.

A movie about clones is a real risk because the popular idea of clone and the scientific reality are totally different. But, Moon pulls it off and makes you care about the way a plucky clone analyzes his situation and copes.

Snow is coming our way. It looks like just a few inches for us, but maybe a foot or two just a few miles south.
I saw this on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools this morning. It looks like something I could use if it didn’t cost $120 plus a fortune to ship.