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.