Stories at Static Movement

Chris at Static Movement Magazine announced that she was not getting any submissions. I know how hard it is to get people to submit to a free venue. Chris has developed a small community at Static-Mo, but she got distracted by Paul Campbell's RAZAR which is an exiting and very interesting idea. Chris and her friends put their effort into RAZAR and then everyone forgot Static-Mo.

So, I sent her some stories. A bunch of other people stepped up and it looks like the December issue of Static Movement Online will be full. I got my own section. I sent in three stories that I felt would never find a home, mostly because of my own quirky style and choice of theme. Chris like them enough to show them off.

There is a very cool audio story by Paul Campbell - don't miss it.

Static Movement doesn't come out until tomorrow, but I have cleverly figured out that the name of the December issue is December.htm.

Take a look Static Movement Online.

Seeing Eye Dogs

Two doors down from the building that I work in is Guiding Eyes for the Blind. When I go out for coffee or lunch I see the dogs being trained to lead the blind, and sometimes a blind person being trained to walk with the dog. The dogs are golden retrievers, black labs, and black and tan retriever-lab crosses. They all have smiles on their doggy faces and seem to wholly enjoy the experience. I see them when they are young and inexperienced, and then later when they are getting serious about their jobs.

They are great dogs. They are the kind of good and loyal friend that has worked closely with man for a million years. It is all I can do not to stop and give them hug and a good petting, but they are working at an important job and I don't want to distract them.

I have thought about getting a dog from time to time. When I am retired I will certainly get one. My grandfather lived well into his nineties and having a dog to walk for the last 30 years of his life contributed to his longevity. I might go to Guiding Eyes and see about adopting a washout. Not all of their dogs "get it" and I expect they have a good number who are too active or interested in their environment to concentrate on the hard work at hand. These dogs would still be well behaved and have had many hours of patient training. They would make the perfect pet. The faults that kept them from being seeing eye dogs might be good qualities in a normal pet.

The only problem that I foresee is the cats. I don't think they would forgive me if I brought home the enemy!

Jack reading On The Road

I've always thought of myself as "beat" rather than "hippie". Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and the rest are just perfect sometimes and just awful the rest. You have to dig through their work to find the great stuff, but it is worth it.
Here is a very cool interview that Jack Kerouac did with Steve Allen (Allen was beat, too). Jack reads from the intro to On The Road, unfortunately cut short, but it is just wonderful.

J is giving away free stuff!

J. Erwine is giving away some of his books.

It's like one of those radio call -ins: Listener # 17 gets the free tickets. In this case if you are requester 0 modulo 10 for the set of positive numbers (sorry, I'm a math geek; that's #10,#20 or #30) then you get a book.
I already tried so actually your odds are now increased (another math thing).

Free Books

Top Ten Great SF Spaceships

There is a list going around of the top ten Film and TV space ships. I am not all that interested in what non-readers consider important so I decided to put together another list of Science Fiction spaceships - the written kind of SF. I am just getting started and I need suggestions.

This is what I have so far (in no particular order):

Scranton, the City. A Life for the Stars, James Blish. The rust belt city in Pennsylvania is surrounded with a spindizzy field transmitter, the city takes off and has great adventures.

The Skylark of Space - E. E. Doc Smith?s original space ship. The science is incredibly dated, but the adventures are fun.

Rocket Ship Galileo - R.A. Heinlein, I had to include R.A.H. but it was hard picking one of his ships. This one is the most fun.

Heart of Gold, from HHGTHG Douglas Adams. This one made the film list.

"Columbiad" from A Trip to the Moon, Jules Verne

I am blanking. Anyone have any more?????

I will go to my library in the morning and look at the titles. Does the ship in Bradbury's Machineries of Joy have a name? What was the ship's name in Nightflyers?

My Last Outstanding Submission

I've had a sub at Black Gate for 306 days. This is the last story that I'm waiting for. I don't do much story submission any more. Today there was a data point on the black hole reporter for Black Gate for a 338 day rejection. They are not catching up. The wait keeps getting longer and longer, but they are still open to submissions. There are very few good S&S Fantasy markets so I sent a piece to them, knowing I'd have to wait 6 months. It's been 10 months. I can hardly wait for the rejection so I don't have to check Speculations and the Black Hole every day.

Note: 11/19/2006 - received rejection. I guess this post and a query stirred the pot a little. It read like a form reject.

Web Site Stats

I've noticed that my income from web pages is up about 40% over last year. Part of this is optimizing, part is new content, and part is higher payment rates. One part that I don't understand is the large increase in traffic lately. I have not been thinking much about traffic growth. I say "son-of-a-gun" when I see the stats, but I just tallied things up for the servers that I use.

So far in November I have over ONE MILLION page views on my websites.

This is astounding to me. About 1/3 of that is spiders, but still that's a lot of eyes. I get about 40,000 - 50,000 real people each day reading my harmonica stuff and even a few reading my fiction and listening to my audio stories. This website and blog are getting lots of page reads a day compared to a year ago. What's with that? The advertising statistics don't show this and they report only 25% of logged users. I guess that people use ad blockers or else the javascript is cached.

I still have lots of pages without ads on them and I have to go back and finish optimizing the more popular websites. PaperTheTown.com is starting to get hits, but the Yahoo ads pay squat. I have to fix that.

Men in Black Suits are watching us Spec Fic bloggers

J Erwine had his logs erased to hide evidence that some black-ops government agencies have been monitoring science fiction writers, editors and publishers. Before the erasure, he was able to determine that ip addresses belonging to certain government agencies were repeatedly hitting his web sites thousands of times.

Last night, all of my blogs were erased in a bungled attempt to hide "Black Suit" surveillance of my own efforts in the field of Spec-Fic. This included CThreePO.com, ScienceFictional.com and AstoundingTales.com. Even the Cat Blog was not safe.

It took 12 hours to rebuild my websites based on backups, but there is no way to trace who or what (alien?) agent has decided that the likes of J and I are are threats to Home-Star-System security.

St. Andrews Guild Nyack, 1940-41 Film

I'll have the DVD in the next day or so and I'll rip that to another type of video for those having trouble with QuickTime.

I tried to fix the link, but I just checked and it's blocked again!

Try this link to the video and see if you have better luck

Too Many Damn Cats

I managed to snag a strong wifi connection, so I posted several cat pics on the cat blog. I know you can't get enough!

Sale! Coyote Wild

Against all odds, I sold "Nest of Flames" to Coyote Wild. I received the following message this afternoon from Lori:

I'm happy to report that you were incorrect. Coyote Wild would like to purchase "A Nest of Flames" for our Spring 2007 issue.

Very cool! Coyote Wild is slickly designed. I like its style. I hope that they can attract some readers. The ezine field is crowded and it is very hard to stand out.

I am trying to work out a few stories for the January Martian Wave. Now, I'll have to finish that odd ghost story that I started and try to hit CW again.

Ollie was unimpressed:

How I Spent My Vacation

I wandered around to every tile place within driving distance taking pictures of tile

Trees

I took some tree pictures over the last couple of weeks. I cleaned out the chip on the cheapo HP camera that I carry in my pocket.

St. Andrews Guild trip to Rye Playland 1940, 1941

My brother found this old 16mm film taken on the Grace Church picnic to Rye Playland before WWII. My mom, her brother's and sisters and many people who I remember from the church are in it. The church hired the Clermont river boat from the foot of Main Street in Nyack, and went around Manhattan to Rye. My uncles took the ferry to Tarrytown and hitchhiked to Rye and took the River Boat back.

note: I've re-done the code - see if it works now.



Click play to see the video. I used HomeMovieDepot.com and it costs $40 for 400 feet. The service was fantastic, although $40 is a bit of cash for 10 minutes of movie. The video is quite professional looking and half of it is in color. My mother doesn't remember who took the movies.

Famous Customer

I sell harmonica microphone parts at JT30.com and yesterday I got an order from a celebrity. Most blues harp celebrities are unknown except to us harp players, but this order is from a real rock star.

I sent out the order today (a vintage Shure mic element).

NASA - Hubble Space Telescope

NASA launched Hubble in 1990, so it was designed and built with mid-1980s technology. There was a strong case against repairing the Hubble rather than building a new one from scratch and launching the Hubble 2 to replace it.

I remember that in a previous upgrade they put in a new motherboard for one of the computers that had a 33 mhz Intel 486 cpu to replace the 16 mhz 386. I am guessing that the Hubble upgrade mission might bump that up a bit and put a whole lot more memory on the motherboard.

Technology, including computer speed and capacity, digital imaging arrays and communications have come a long way since 1985.

There is a strong emotional reaction to letting the Hubble telescope burn up in the atmosphere. Hubble has given us some of the greatest space images in the history of astronomy. I suspect that we will pay for that emotional attachment. I think that upgrading will be more expensive than launching a Hubble 2 telescope.

Even if all of the electronics are replaced, new high density CCD arrays replace the old ones, lenses are replaced, and the power system completely upgraded, the best outcome will be that Hubble 2 is built in the old Hubble chassis. We will still have a 1985 basic design and all that we have learned from operating the Hubble telescope will not be incorporated into the basic structure of the telescope.

That being said, I look forward to the new images that the improved 2005 design will bring us starting around 2008. The Universe is a beautiful place and the Hubble has brought some of that beauty home to us.

NASA - Hubble Space Telescope