Robert Finally Wins at Poker

The other night, Robert, won at poker. Robert is know for his over-the-top performances at the local improv club, and this little video clip is an example of what we have to put up with.

Another Web Page????

Yet another free website. This one is everything that Microsoft OfficeLive wanted to be and yet wasn't. All that you would need is the ability to attach a domain name and you'd have a decent site.

Google would have to add a few widgets and apps, but it could be a useable business starter site.

I like the nice style sheet. It's much better than the OfficeLive css and w3c standard as well.

Another Web Page????

Space Squid

This is an odd zine. I tried to sell a story their once and they liked it but it was not weird enough for them. They are having some kind of Issue # Two release party down in Austin at Fado's (214 west 4th) August 1, 6:30. It sounds like my kind of thing: including $3 drinks and 2 minute flash fiction readings.

If you have never been to Austin Texas, you should try to make it. Austin is a Blues town and every guitar player sounds like Stevie Ray. At night they close the main streets to cars and you can go from bar to bar to sample the music.

Space Squid

Batshit Crazy: T-Shirt Humor: The Funny T-Shirt Store

Chris claims that she has never heard of the term Bat-Shit Crazy.

Well, Chris, here's the T-shirt!

Batshit Crazy: T-Shirt Humor: The Funny T-Shirt Store

Science Fictional - A Journal of Science Fiction

My brother had to clean out the back yard. The town has told him that he had to get rid of the old Chevies and his lawn mower collection. He rented a dumpster and started cleaning out the barn so he could store some of his treasures. He dumped piles of stuff including a wonderful collection of vinyl records that he had found at the side of the road.

I went through the records and found a cool Captain Beefheart album, The Spotlight Kid. One of the songs is a psychedelic blues/rock song called "Grow Fins" about a man who meets a mermaid and wants to grow fins so he can be with her.

The song gave me the title for the latest story that I ghosted over at Sciencefictional.com. It's a flash piece called "Grow Fins".

Science Fictional - A Journal of Science Fiction

Space date set for Scotty's ashes

The ashes of Scotty (James Doohan), my favorite Star Trek character, are going to be launched into space. The symbolic act would have pleased him, I think. Although we only know the part that the actor played and not the man, from all accounts, James Doohan was every bit as nice a guy as the character Scotty.

My favorite Scotty episode? I like the second generation episode, Relics, where Geordi and Scotty have to escape from a Dyson Sphere. The contrast of styles is wonderful.

BBC NEWS - Space date set for Scotty's ashes

Bad host - Bad host!

I switched over to Hostmerit for some of my websites a few months ago. If you follow the blog, you will remember that I lost a week at the previous host when they shut me off without notice. I was able to resolve that, but I contracted with Hostmerit.com because they were local (Newark, NJ) and they had a good price on a reseller package. I made myself a hosting services reseller.

This has proved to be a mistake. Hostmerit is a very small shop with problems keeping their hosting service up and running. In the past month, they have filled up a disk and they screwed up the config and for the last week non of my websites have been working. My site is up and down during the week and I lose money.

They moved me to a knew machine over night and I lost 9 days of updates (including this blog). I am going to republish the blog and copy over the images again, but this is not a good turn of events. It means that I have to go out host shopping again.

I need 50 gigs of traffic, about 100 meg of storage and 50 domain names. I need php and mySql with graphics installed. Hostmerit was cheap ($12 a month), but I will probably have to pay $25 or $30 for a more stable environment.

The worst about hostmerit is the third world support desk that requires you to explain in detail several times what the problem is, and they still answer from a script about a problem that has nothing to do with what is going on.

Update:
The hosting company restored from a more recent backup, but as a result, I lost all of yesterday's sales and updates. Damn, this is difficult! FreeNameAStar is down the tubes again and I have to re-re-re update everything.

Apollo 11 - 37 years

Tyree reminded me what happened this week 37 years ago.

Summer of 69 I was working to get enough money to go to college. I missed things. I didn't go to Woodstock because I couldn't take off the time from work. I missed the live Lunar Landing because I was working overtime in a dark basement pulling wires as an electrician's helper.

At the poker table the other night, Jim asked each of us what was out biggest regret in life. I have many, but wasting my time on a stupid job instead of going to Woodstock or watching Armstrong's first steps were in the top ten.

I have a little list of things that I need to do. I want to meet some people while I can. I want to shake the hands of a few of my heroes. I want to be a witness to events that I care about.

I don't want to have to watch stuff on TV that I could have been a part of.

I don't want to add another regret to the list.

But, here I am, in a little cubicle in the middle of a big room, trying to look busy doing stuff I don't care about because I can't afford not to.

Apollo 11

Why Blog?

J. Alan Erwine put me on his blog roll. I know he occasionally drops by, because he has made some interesting comments, but I am used to being mostly ignored on the internet. Except for a couple of mentions in BoingBoing.net, I think that I am a fairly anonymous guy. Google me, though, and you get over 100,000 hits - not all of which are mine. (There is a talented web designer in the UK, another programmer in the Northwest, and a popular minister in the Midwest with my name.) The page count is not because I am famous, it is just because that I've been around for a while. There are even references to software that I wrote in 1983. Most of the Google page count means nothing to me in the context of the present.

How should I feel about people reading my blog? I fill the pages with old memories, gossipy news about my family and poker buddies, an occasional cat story, technical stuff about my websites, writing (or lack thereof), and programming projects. Most of it is really not interesting to anyone who doesn't know me. The blog gets a few hundred readers a day, though. Who are you people? Do I know you?

This begs the question, why should I blog?

1) The main legit reason for me to blog is that it gives me Back-Links to my web sites that sites like Technorati and Google use to rank my other website pages. Blogs are an effective way to create valid cross-links. Whenever I make a post, I use Pin-O-Matic to notify all of the blog aggregators about the update. Almost all of my web pages are Google page rank 4 or higher. I credit the blog for much of this.

2) A semi-legit reason for the blog is to notify my small blog readership of interesting events and thereby generate traffic. For instance, when I blogged about my story that came out recently in the Harrow, I noticed about 30 outbound links to read the story. This makes me look good over at the Harrow and so maybe they'll publish another story, that is, if they analyze their stats, and if I ever write another story in their style. (tech note: If you have a blog, go to mybloglog.com, register and put the code on your blog template. It will give you some interesting facts about your blog readership.)

3) A not-so-legit reason to blog is ego. I act self-deprecating, but I find myself seeking approval. I don't approve of my approval seeking, though, and self-edit, hence the (false) self-deprecation.

4) I need to write. Many of my entries are more like articles. I want to develop a good story and tell it. One of my favorite blog entries is The Kid Loves Pook from February, 2005. I thought that this was an interesting romantic tale, even though no one read it. I don't have time to write a 4,000 word story, but I can throw 400 words into a blog post and get the same satisfaction. In this case, it is the writing that offers some satisfaction and it matters only a little that no one reads it.

5) The least legit reason to blog is to have something - anything, on the blog. I am afraid that if I don't come up with an entry every few days, you will all go away and not come back. Even when I have nothing that fits 1-4 above, I can come up with a cute thought or a link to an interesting site. These are maintenance posts and I am not proud of them.

There are a few good reasons not to blog.

1) It is best to be anonymous in these dangerous times. Erica has asked me to take off information about her, and occasionally she asks me to remove stuff that I have revealed about myself because it could be damaging. Erica has the common sense in our family.

2) You can't take it back. I could say something that offends or hurts someone and it will be in the nets forever. WayBackMachine.org has a database of most web pages going back ten years. Google has a cache that will show the original version of a page if it has been changed recently. If I make a mistake or regret something that I've written, it doesn't matter if I recant it. It will follow me around forever, even if I delete the post. At any time, the right search engine query will display anything that I've done and said, no matter how stupid. It might be better not to blog at all than to record in stone just what a jerk I am.

3) I am not a good judge as to what is good and interesting. "90% is crap" is the rule of thumb. I can't tell if it is crap or not, so I just blog it. I don't want to blog 90% crap, so I convince myself the percentage is somewhat less than 90.

4) People that you meet on the internet seem different, interesting and mostly very nice. The few that I have met in person, however, have been crazy, obnoxious, and/or scary. The internet is a mask. I fool myself into thinking that you all are not bat-shit crazy. This is something that you have to be aware of when you blog. (Especially genre writers seem to be "A Bubble Off Plumb" as my grandfather used to say - no offense guys)

There are the pros and cons. Overall; blogging has been a very positive experience. I would recommend it to every writer. Write an entry every day. Use it to keep your skills up. Use it to challenge you with alternative approaches to old problems. Just be aware of the proper reasons to blog. Be aware of its dangers. Be aware that no one is reading it.

Most of all remember there is an insane person planning to kill you because of some off-hand remark that you wrote in your blog, but have fun with it anyway.

Website News Bites

Free Name A Star has registered over 225 stars in its first two months. Ten stars have paid extras. I've made about $60 off the sales and another $30 off ads. Traffic is doubling every two weeks. By November I should be a millionaire. Shortly after that, if the progression holds out, I will own the whole wide world. By way of comparison, Name A Galaxy has only registered 1200 galaxies in four years.

The MLB stat sites such as Mets Magic Number are getting about 250 page hits a day and are making a dollar or so a day. The traffic is doubling every month. It will be several years before I can buy the whole world from the profits off these sites. Ebay ads for baseball tickets do very well on these sites, though - who knew?

RockFind, my lyrics site, has jumped from 200 unique users a day to 500 in just the last week. I have no idea why. I am getting $3 a day there from affiliate ads.

ScienceFictional is getting hits, although mostly from search engines. I should have pretended to offer pro rates for the stories that I'll never buy, but I thought that was pretentious for a new zine. I'm trying to write a new flash story a day to publish under a pseudonym, but I am averaging a story every 18 hours. Soon, real authors may write some free flash in support of my evil plan. Eventually, thousands of struggling SF writers will contribute to my grand scheme to own the whole wide world. (Evil laughter fades off stage left.)

I Miss Star Trek

I remember coming home from college and stopping by Erica's house (long before we were married). Erica's Dad was a Trekky (sp?). I sat with him and watched an episode of STOS in COLOR! My parents had a black and white set. Because I was spending most of my time during the last original Trek year in New York going to college, I didn't catch all of the last episodes. I once calculated the probablility of watching a random STOS episode and having it be one that I never saw. Over the years the probability has gone down, but it is not yet zero. There is still hope of catching an episode that I've never seen.

The problem is this: There is no Star Trek on TV! I can't test my theory. I have the nagging suspicion that there is an original series episode that I can still feel the awe of a first viewing. I am also sure that there are Next Generation and Voyager episodes that I missed. (I don't really care if I missed any DS9 or Enterprise chapters.) Everyone needs time to cleanse their pallete and watch the other garbage on TV for a while before they appreciate a good hour with trek. Star Trek will rise again.

A bad Star Trek episode is still better than the best prime time TV show. You know TV is bad when I look forward to the next Gillmore Girls. (Cool writing, cute chicks - I'll watch it. Also, I get stopped on the street by people who think that I am Edward Herrmann. I sort-of look like a (younger) Richard Gilmore. Also, Lorelie's real name is Lauren Graham - a distant cousin?)

Sunday, I bought a large bag of loose books on tape for $5. It was about 50 hours of listening. It included the audio abridgement of the book adaptation of the movie Generations. Without the hammy acting and scenery chewing that goes along with the remarkably low talent trek actors, the story is not half bad. I am getting my Star Trek fix, these last two days.

Amazon.com: Star Trek Generations Cassette: Books: J.M. Dillard

ScienceFictional Editor

An old friend of mine, Mike Turabian, contacted me out of the blue. We worked together back in 2000 at IBM. He writes mostly mystery stories now, be he published two SF novels and a bunch of stories back in the early 80s. He came across my blog and read about ScienceFictional.com. He called me and we talked and he wants to be an Editor - what a jerk!

Anyway, I figure that if any one can cure him of this notion, I could. After I finished a complete reinstall of Geeklog at the site, I gave him the passwords and a hale and hearty Good Luck.

Mike is an avid reader of Analog, F&SF and a few other zines. He has old fashioned notions about what makes a good story, so I tend to agree with him.

He's casting nets for unwary writers as we speak. He may decide to get rid of the themes that I came up with, it depends what stories he can get.

At least if our friendship is destroyed by this, I can comfort myself by the knowledge that Mike did this to himself, of his own free will.

Science Fictional - A Journal of Science Fiction

I have decided to format ScienceFictional.com as a prototype eZine. My theory is that the only ones who read science fiction zines are writers who want to get published. I have decided to create a science fiction eZine with no content, only guidelines.

I have the idea that I might make it a community blog where users can post their own stories, but I will wait on that for a while. I haven't actually seen any community blog software that I like.

I hope to make the guidelines more complex as time goes on and add an essay or two about what I want and don't want. I expect that I can keep this up for several years.

Science Fictional - A Journal of Science Fiction

Hemingway - To Have and Have Not

I bought a mixed lot of books on tape on eBay. There were a few Hemingway titles. I finished To Have and Have Not, yesterday. Back around 1972, while waiting to be drafted, I read every Hemingway title at the Forham Library. I remember being confused, because I had liked the movie. The book has nothing to do with the movie, except for the name of two of the characters and a boat.

The book is a dark journey through the last days of a smuggler from the Florida Keys. Hemingway has an incredible ability to create characters with broad Picasso like strokes. The characters are mostly not very likeable, though. He kills off his best characters and spends way too much time on trivial ones.

I find myself yelling at the tape. "Why the hell did you write that?"

He telegraphs all of his plot points so we get to worry about them in advance, and by the end of the book I was glad the hero was dead and the book was finally over.

I have tremendous respect for Hemingway's style and control. I am sorry that he was so messed up personally. I wish that I could create such real characters with so little effort, but I'm glad that I don't have deep emotional problems that cause me to write great novels.

On the positive front, I just found out that I may have four The Who tickets for MSG this September. You guys out there in the blogosphere better be nice to me while I decide who gets to go with me.

Augusta Heritage Center's Blues Week

If I've seemed a little down lately, it's because of Blues Week. I went there several times and it's where I learned to play harmonica. I miss it very much, but I can't go because I don't get paid vacation as a consultant and I am too cheap to lose a weeks pay. I want to go and I am sad that I won't be there.

There will be time to go to Blues Week when I retire - I hope.

This time they have Skip James - cool guy. The picture shows John Cephus and Phil Wiggins jamming at the Wednesday night party. I sat just out of the snapshot sitting directly to John's left. (Drunk out of my mind on West Virginia moonshine and wailing like a banshee on the harp.) I drank gallons of white lightning and never had a hangover. I love West Virginia.

If you love blues, especially accoustic blues, run, don't walk, to Elkins West Virginia next week. There is always room for latecomers. It costs about $700 for the classes, room and board. You will never regret it. I regularly dream about Blues Week and they are always happy dreams.

Augusta Heritage Center's Blues Week

Story: Speed Trap back - 96 days

My story, Speed Trap, was returned with suggestions for a rewrite. I have not written anything new in almost a year now. I am not excited about breaking this story out and working on it. It is a unique piece, unlike anything I've read in any of the internet zines, but it would be nice to find it a home.

I wrote Speed Trap New Years Day, 2003, and it has been out at various zines the whole time since. I have rewritten it many, many times. The current version does not resemble the first draft at all, and I don't have a clear vision for it anymore. This was one of my favorites, or I would have trunked it long ago. It always gets a "close but no cigar" comment from editors.

I don't exactly have writers block, because I still get many ideas for stories and my idea book gets a new entry almost every day. I just don't have the heart to follow through on the ideas. The submit/wait/reject/submit cycle makes the whole process discouraging. My own experience with an ezine tells me that very few people actually read the stories that eventually get published. (eZines are only read by writers who want to publish. There is no other audience.)

I will retire some time in the next 10 years. I will then open up the idea book and start cranking out words. I am not sure that I will submit any of them, though. I may just post the stories to one of my websites - cut out the middle man.

Only one story left out there, now. I submitted that 179 days ago to Black Gate and I don't expect the reject back for another year, if ever, as John O'Neill has a new job and admitted he has no time for the zine, anymore.

Anti-Spam image program and PHP source code.

I wrote a quick and dirty antispam image confirmation routine. I will incorporate it into my Harp Links site and any future sites that are attractive to link spammers.Anti-Spam image program and PHP source code.

Serious Internet Jones

The boxed up my 'puter yesterday afternoon for the move to my new office. Today at 2pm, I reattached. This is the first time that I've gone 24 hours without internet access in about 10 years. I hope I don't have to do that again soon. I suffered from cold sweats and hallucinations the last few hours.

Interesting Saturday Sailing

I go sailing on Saturdays - Garage Sailing that is. I picked up some great stuff.

First, I bought a Fisher receiver for $5. It has $250 worth of tubes in it and recently has sold on eBay for over $500. It works well and I don't know if I should keep it or not.

---

I bought two screenplays from the 1940s. These scripts cost me $4 and that seems to be their value, but to me they are a wonderful find. They have the 20th Century Fox stationary mark on them and they are a good example of an historic piece of movie memorabilia. They are for movies that were actually made. One is The Eve of St. Mark, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson. Anderson lived nearby and wrote about the local scenery. His famous play Hi Tor is about the mountain that looms above the town of Haverstaraw, 5 miles up the river form here. During college I worked the 11PM to 6AM shift at a diner with one of his grandsons.


The Nyack area has been the home of artists and writers for years. I've been to parties where the Weavers (1950's blacklisted folk group) played. My wife's family was good friends with Burgess Meredith and Mitch Miller. My Grandfather knew them both. I went to school with Leo Tolstoy's grandchildren. My Great Grandfather was good friends with William Porter (O Henry) and knew the Barrymore family of actors. My 13 greats grandfather was named Van Winkle and was know as Rip. Family tradition has it that he was the same one named in the famous short story.
When Erica was in college (Bates in Maine), one of the teachers remarked about Washington Irving's vivid imagination to be able to make up Rip and The legend of Sleepy Hollow. Anyone from around here knows that they are old stories that Irving just cleaned up and published. There is a real Sleepy Hollow and the legend of the headless horseman goes back almost 200 years among my ancestors before Irving wrote them up.
When Erica corrected the teacher, the professor told her that she did not know what she was talking about.

Happy Trails

I scored big time at the flea market, Sunday. I found a box of vinyl LPs. The person must have had exactly my taste in music. The great find was "Happy Trails, Quicksilver Messenger Service", which I have not heard in 35 years. I was a Quicksilver fan in the late 60's and this was their best album, recorded live at the Filmore. Click on the link and listen to the clip of Mona. Very cool!!!!!
I scored two early Johnny Winter albums, the first Fabulous Thunderbirds, The Byrds - Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Commander Cody's first album, two Canned Heat records, Music from Big Pink, Allman Bros live at Fillmore, John Mayhall with Clapton and a bunch of others. All in pristine condition!

50 cents each!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We are set at the poker game for weeks.

Monte's Goats

BoingBoing.net has a counter-intutive proof in probability.

Suppose you’re on Monty Hall’s Let’s Make a Deal! You are given the choice of three doors, behind one door is a car, the others, goats. You pick a door, say 1, Monty opens another door, say 3, which has a goat. Monty says to you “Do you want to pick door 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?

Marilyn [vos Savant] gave a solution concluding that you should switch, and if you do, your probability of winning is 2/3. Several irate readers, some of whom identified themselves as having a PhD in mathematics, said that this is absurd since after Monty has ruled out one door there are only two possible doors and they should still each have the same probability 1/2 so there is no advantage to switching. Marilyn stuck to her solution and encouraged her readers to simulate the game and draw their own conclusions from this. We also encourage the reader to do this (see Exercise 11).

My illustration of Monte's Goats is at Astoundme.com. Rather than try to prove or disprove it, I simulate 10,000 Let's Make a Deal games and check the results. It really does improve your odds if you change doors.

Office Live - Update

A while ago, I blogged how Microsoft is giving away free domain names if you try their free service, OfficeLive. I signed up and got my free domain name and tried out their site. OfficeLive Basic, is a hook to get you to sign up to the extravagantly priced other Office Live products at $29.9 a month.

Here are my impressions of Microsoft Office Live (free version).

Positives:

• Price is right.
• Might be a good place for a Business Card: a website with no functionality except contact information and product information. Adequate for a small company that wants web exposure, but does not want to do any online selling.

Negatives:

• Updating the site requires Internet Explorer.
• Site is Verrrrryyyy Slooooooow.
• No JavaScript.
• No Server Side scripting. There are no counters, forums, contact forms, blogs or other applications that EVERY website needs to succeed.
• You must use their templates for websites.
• The css and the Microsoft JavaScript are buggy. Pages do not display correctly under other browsers because of non-standard use of css elements and JavaScript. 15-30% of users will have display issues.
• Mail interface is very slow and requires multiple clicks to do simple things. You can't autoforward mail to a more reasonable mailbox. No POP3.
• No FTP access.

You can quit Office Live after 60 days and the free domain name is yours to keep. I followed the complicated instructions and was able to free up ScienceFictional.com. I now have another domain name. I don't really need it, but I'll find a use for it someday. It redirects to CthreePO.com for the time being. Anyone need ScienceFictional.com? - it's for sale cheap - and I'll throw in cheap hosting. (along with AsoundingTales, AstoundingStories, AstoundingSF, AstoundingScienceFiction, StrangeTales.net, ATales.com and several others - AstoundingTales.com has a google page rank of 5 so it might be worth money.)

Gremlins Over Normandy

My short story, Gremlins Over Normandy. is up at The Harrow: Original Works of Fantasy and Horror: Vol. 9, No. 7 (2006)

Mom's Pictures

Mom took a bunch of pictures and checked off the "CD" box when she had them developed. This link is to an album of Mom's pictures. There are DAR ladies, friends, and miscellaneous people who showed up at Grace Thrift Shop Where Mom works. There's a couple of odd pictures including one of Erica and me sitting on the couch at the old homestead.
The picture above is a few DAR girls (Mom is on the right) wearing home made revolutionary war cosutumes at the Flag Day ceremony at the Stony Point Battle Field. The battle of Stony Point is an important local piece of history that is nearly unknown anywhere else.
Please click on the link to view the pics. I am sorry, but I don't know anyone's name.