Website stuff

I am letting a few websites expire. AstoundingSF.com, ATales.com and AstoundingScienceFiction will all disappear in a few days. If anyone needs them, let me know. I have not had good luck transferring domains out of Register.com. I am betwixt and between about AstoundingTales.com. It is due, also. It is a very good name for a zine, in spite of its disastrous history. I may keep it for a while. I will let sciencefictional.com and strangetales.net drop. I do not need these spec-fic names as I do not want to be in the business side of spec-fic.

I am going to stop the story of a day at ScienceFictional.com. It is time consuming to find the stories and stats show a negative slope. It jumped up to nearly a hundred hits a day after the SFSignal mention. It has been dropping steadily ever since (see graph at left). I have a few dozen RSS readers and a dozen page hits a day. This is not worth the effort and there is no indication that things will get better.

I have been tracking the blog entries of people whose stories get mentioned. Everyone, it seems, thinks that it is some kind of honor, like their story is the best story. The truth is, I read the first paragraph or two looking for sciencefictional elements and then scan the rest for bad words, zombies, vampires, unicorns or other deal killers. I read the last paragraph to see if the story is worth reading (it never is). If I think it's a real SF story, I add it to the list.

I saw this as a promotional tool. I thought that writers would flock to the page to promote their science fiction. I even wrote a program to automatically post stories from the suggested story list. So far I've received two usable suggestions and a bunch of self published stories. The self published stories aren't all that terrible, but I would like to include only real published stories on the list.

I have stories on ScienceFictional until June 1. If I have time between now and then I'll hunt up a few more. If next weekend comes around and I can't find any stories in the new zine issues, I will dump the site.

LINA - open source everywhere

The big buy-in for the Java language was write-once - run-anywhere. Java classes work on different machines. This was a good thing for CIOs that came from the big mainframe world and bought into various mini and micro computers, only to find that software had to be rewritten each time. The AS/400 was a counter attack by IBM against the PC that it spawned. The AS/400 felt and tasted like a mainframe so the CIOs of the big companies fell in love - until they discovered that the code needed to be re-written.

The upper management of companies with expensive development costs have been searching for a way to cut my salary for 35 years. The idea of write-once run anywhere is one answer they understand. The code re-use argument of Object-Oriented programming sounded good, but has never paid off. Java is a dog and seems to cost ten times as much as hardware costs as programmer savings, just to make it run.

This is an old idea. Back in the early 1970s, Nicklaus Wirth invented a programming language called Pascal based on an older language called Algol. Pascal (based on Algol) is the father of C, Java and PHP. One feature of Pascal was that it compiled into P-code, a virtual machine language. In the 1990s the idea of P-code was reinvented in Java Byte Codes.

Since Java, we have learned a lot about machine languages and now there is

Lina

Lina is a byte code/p-code engine for Linux and perhaps even Windows and Apple OS's. It is designed, not only to take care of different CPUs, but to handle different operating systems and hardware. The goal is a true write-once Run-anywhere engine. Something that Pascal and Java never achieved.

I like this because it means more work for me. Now, there will be a porting of Java that compiles to the Java Byte Code to Java apps that compile to LINA. PHP, which already compiles to an intermediate byte code, could easily compile to LINA. I hope that this appeals to the CIOs of all the major corporations, and they need people like me to implement it.

By the way, nobody seems to understand that there is no such thing as a interchangeable parts when it comes to programming. I am an artist, I am a poet, I am a mystic - at least when it comes to programs. There is no one who can replace me.

I produce art, not code.


LINA - open source everywhere

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

You gotta love P.K. Dick. He's just great. How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

Affiliate Program - Science Fiction & Fantasy Audio Books

I just joined the buzzymultimedia affiliate program for two three reasons. First, I am always looking for a way to make a little money. Two they produce audio Science Fiction and Fantasy. I like audio books and I love sf, so I want to support anyone who is supporting both of these. Lastly, anybody who calls themselves Buzzy Media deserves all the help that I can give them.

Affiliate programs cost you nothing. You sign up with them, put their ads on your blog or webpage, and collect money. The odds are you won't collect much, so think of this as supporting the arts.

For us website owners and bloggers there is no cost, but for Buzzy there is some expense. BuzzyMedia uses the ShareASale system which is a $350 buy-in and they charge him $25 a month. BuzzyMedia has to sell a few hundred dollars worth of merchandise every month to make the system pay. My Amazon affiliate stuff on this blog grosses somewhere in between $25 or so a month (usually one or two books or CDs), which translates to less than $5 a month. Buzzy is going to have to pull in a few dozen partners like me to show a profit on this.

I am rooting for Buzzy, so everybody go sign up and get a banner for your websites. It will be a while before I make enough money to receive a payment, if ever, but I want them to stay in business long enough to get some cash. I will probably use any profit that I get to buy Audio books from them, anyway.

Affiliate Program - Buzzy Multimedia - Excellence in Science Fiction & Fantasy Audio Books

Will Work for Spaceflight

I've been applying for NASA jobs (they even have some writing jobs, J) for a while, but unfortunately there have been no nibbles. You can sign up for free job alerts at USAJobs. For NASA only jobs you have to choose NASA as an Agency.

I just read this article at Space.com about volunteering to promote space. The article is very vague on exactly how you might go about doing this, but it seems like a good idea. I want space to be in humanity's future. I think is important for humans to expand to the stars. I've been trying to get a job working one of the space related agencies or in a government contractor working at NASA. I've even sent a resume out to Scaled Composites, the winners of the X prize.

This weekend, I will send in my tuition to Swinburne for their intro course in their Master's Degree in Astronomy.

Space is a worthwhile goal and I intend to figure out some way to help make it happen.

Audio Book Report

I just finished listening to The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. It was remarkably well written, but I was very turned off by the gross-out scenes. They did not appear necessary to the story. I suspect that the scenes involving the demented sexual activities of a 12 year old girl could easily be removed. It is quite possible to make the book frightening and horrific without having children molested. Don't listen to this one unless you have a high tolerance for this kind of thing. It left a bad taste in my mouth and without the nasty stuff, the book would have been much better (but probably not as popular).

Previous to this, I listened to Potshot by Robert B. Parker. This is another Spenser book. I am finding Parker very good, in spite of Steven K. Zoltán Brust's claim that Parker is past is prime and is phoning in the Spenser novels. This one, however, takes place far from Boston, and is not as good as the others because of this. It is reminiscent of "The Magnificent Seven" where Spenser gathers his friend Hawk and a bunch of honorable criminals to clean out the corruption in New Mexico town. Everyone lives at the end and Spenser maintains his honor in spite of the murderer getting away free. It features a short part for the "Gray Man" and I am eagerly awaiting the final confrontation between the Gray Man and Spenser.

I am currently listening to Justine by Lawrence Durrell on tape. It took a long time to find this as it is published only in England and is not available in the US. Justine is part of the Alexandrian Quartet. Erica had to read this at Fordham and after she finished, I read the four books. I've read Justine three times since and I think that it is one of the most beautifully complex and significant books that I have ever read. It is in the same vein as Joyce's Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses, but it is much more accessible. The Quartet is four novels told with different viewpoints, styles and plots about the same characters and events. It is not as though they are the same events told by different characters, but they are four separate novels. They yield a composite truth, but I think the overall idea is that reality really depends on the observer. It is steeped in Durrell's interest in the uncertainty principle and Einstein's relativity as much as the art of a Novel. There is no real truth and different observers not only see events differently, but the significance of the events change dramatically in each novel.

The famous mirror scene in Justine seems to state Durrell's intentions:

I remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker's, being fitted for a shark-skin costume, and saying: 'Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimension effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time?

The question is this. If Justine sees five different images and there are four books, who is the fifth image? Herself? The Reader? Durrell?

I intend to listen to Justine over again as soon as I finish it. As I ride to work in the morning traffic, I frequently rewind the tape to listen to a particularly good part or replay a section that was difficult to understand. This book, like all good books, is all the better for being read aloud.

In my listening box are two detective novels by Elmore Leonard and Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. I will be having a happy commute for the next few weeks.

bacteria as a data store

In Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic, a man stored secrets in a chip in his head. He eventually teams up with a dolphin, modified by the Navy to detect magnetic traces. The Dolphin uses it's SQUID (superconducting quantum interference devices) technology to read the secrets and blackmail the Yakuza. Johnny is later murdered in Neuromancer. Why wasn't the information encrypted? Well, Gibson isn't all that technical.

This idea of storing information in a human is from the Hitchcock movie The 39 Steps, where a mentalist is given a secret plan to memorize and doesn't even know it.

A Japanese researcher has been able to encode a message in the DNA of bacteria. As much as 90% of DNA is garbage fill between the useful parts. This garbage is bits and pieces of old genes or random noise. It has to be there, though because, at least some of it, is required to get the significant code to work and there is kind of error correcting checksum that relies on parts of the garbage sections to turn out right. (At least this is my understanding.) These garbage sections of code can be rewritten to contain information encoded in base 4.

I am sure that this has been done, but I think an interesting MacGuffin would be to have an innocent person's DNA encoded with some top secret information and pursued in a novel.


Japanese use bacteria to store data

Nasty Zine Closure

I don't know anything about Dark Krypt. The name alone tells you that it is not my kind of zine.

The closure message was very nasty, though.

"An extended illness coupled with incompetent and unreliable staff has forced The Dark Krypt to temporarily close its doors."

Unpleasant, to say the least.

As Woodrow Wilson said about academic politics, "they are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

Toufee - Create Free Flash Movies!

I have blogged about flash being a new interface. Flash permits the integration of music, graphics and text in a way that HTML can not even start to do. Flash has been around for a while, but unlike HTML, flash has several barriers to newbies. The flash software from Macromedia is expensive. The interface is not overly hard, but the concepts are much more difficult than putting text on an html page. Good flash requires a little programming and most people are daunted by programming. Good for me because I make a living at it. Bad for the rest of the world.

One of the writers on a web group where I lurk has produced a "Book Trailer" in flash. This is an animated short flash piece that works like a Movie Trailer. It is a teaser for the book. I can possibly think of a few ways to improve what he has done, but looking at it, it is very impressive. I would like to see more words from the book. I want to hear less music or perhaps some juicy quotes over the music. I want to see even more snazzy graphics. That being said, the Trailer Lee has created is dynamite and is a very good starting point. I look forward to Trailer 2.0. His Trailer, by the way, is one of the better examples on Toufee.com

You can see the Book Trailer at Lee Pletzers' website.

You can create your own Book Trailer for your website at:

Toufee - Create Free Flash Movies!

Stylin'

I have spent the last 15 years writing basically butt-ugly web pages. I have always been proud that my pages have a certain Joie d'Ordure. I think it has been the absolute lack of aesthetic values that have made my web pages stand out. They are memorable in their butt-ugliness. I have received countless complaints from sensitive web surfers about how my pages hurt their eyes or their sensibilities. These same self same surfers continually return to my pages because I offer something that is hard to find on the internet - good content.

So, when I was asked to teach a course in web page design, I thought it was a joke. Sure, I know how to make a web page. I am up on all the latest CSS tricks and techniques. I am not, however an artist, just a poor mechanic who can cobble together a working page in a matter of minutes.

Last week I finished teaching Art 144 - Web page Design, for the second time, and I have been looking at the student projects and some of them are damn fine. I tried to give the kids in my class all the tools that they could use to make a web page, but little guidance as to what makes a good web page. We discussed it in class, but I limited my comments on design to a saying borrowed from my wife's aviation career. Any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing - translated to web pages - Any web page you can read is a good web page.

The last four class periods, I banged into their pointed little heads a three-column template. I wanted them to be able to make a top banner, left and right floating columns for ads and menus, and a footer at the bottom of the page. This is very easy to do with CSS, but I wanted them to be able to understand what they were doing so they did not need a template or a cheat sheet. I wanted them to be able to do it in notepad if needed. The CSS is very simple. I wanted them to use DIV tags instead of tables. At least four times each class I started with a blank screen and built the three columns. I had different students try it on the screen and I got it so some of them could call out "Float Left!" when I came to the right place in the style section. The class took this and ran with it.

I suppose I yelled out things like "Don't use too many fonts", "Don't use color unless it really means something", "Don't use the marquee tag or the blink tag", "KISS (keep it simple stupid)", "Use white space to separate ideas" and so on for the whole three hours. Something must have stuck, because the class projects were very good.

I recently have been faced with declining ad revenue from my harmonica sites. I make up for this with the FreeNameAStar site, but I wanted to do a rewrite on one the harmonica sites to make it more search engine friendly. Using the three column design that I forced on my class, I began to rewrite the site template.

I made the template as simple as I possibly could. I have a top banner 60 pixels high by 100% wide. Above the banner, I have a thin ad link bar. Under the banner, I have a thin strip with a search box and an email contact. The left column is 120 pixels wide and has one ad tower. The right side is 200 pixels wide and has links to my related sites, a drop down box with the archive files, and then links to articles that I've written over the years.

The bottom banner has the WebRing code (one of the lost secrets of driving traffic.) It also has the hard coded links to all the articles on the site. I hard coded them in the bottom banner because the rightmost menu is done in JavaScript. Spiders won't crawl inside of JavaScript so I wanted to make sure that the web spiders find all of my pages, that's why I link everywhere in the bottom banner area. This bottom banner is a server side include and has the MyBlogLog code and other scripts to help me with the web stats.

I made the right column menu JavaScript to keep the real content nearer to the top of the page. On the old web page, there was so much crap that the spiders didn't get to the important content until 5K into the html. This hurts me in the search engine rankings.

The context ads on the left hand side are subtly colored, while the rest of the site is starkly black and white. This makes the ads, situated in the "hot spot", sparkle just a little more.

The site looks a little Web 2.0-ish. I am not fond of that style, but I have to admit that it is easier to read and it loads much faster than it used to.

The results are that in two days of running the new site, I have tripled my eCPM (measure of how many people click ads). The old ads were at the top of the page and on the right hand side after some menus. Now the ads are on the left only (except for the link bars) and are right up against content. The content has more space between entries and some white space padding. The ads are very readable and difficult to ignore. The context ads for my harmonica site are all about harmonica amplifiers, harp amps, and microphones, giving surfers a real reason to click the ads.

I will see if my search engine hits go up as the new page is spidered. This takes months sometimes, as the search engines don't rebuild their indexes every day. There is always the danger that I took something off the site that will lower my search traffic. 85% of my traffic comes from searches and the rest comes from my die hard fans. I'll report in a few weeks how my search engine traffic is holding up.

I only applied these changes to the blog part of my pages. Now I have to rewrite all of the other pages. Some are technically in violation of the search engine Terms of service, so I have to get to it. I can apply the new template to every page on the site and if I am lucky, I might double my income.

blog post from Google docs

This is a document created by Google Docs. Google Docs is a way to share and publish documents on the internet. It is compatible with Microsoft Word documents and Excel Spreadsheets.

This is a test of the ability to publish a blog post from Google docs.

Note: I had to go back and edit the post. It screwed up the title and messed up my blog format.

Neuromancer Movie

After years of legal hassle, they might finally be making the Movie version Gibson's Neuromancer.

The Garden State Mall used to be an outdoor mall. There are 4 or 5 malls in that part of New Jersey within a mile or two of each other. I used to go with Erica and while she shopped I would hang out at a Science Fiction book store ( I can't remember the name). At the time it was the only SF book store that I've ever seen. I bought Vernor Vinge's novel True Names at this store. There was a trade paperback of Neuromancer. It was the one with the cool cover that is now worth several thousand dollars. I wanted to buy it, but it was $10 and I did not want to invest my cash in a book with a cool cover and a good first page that might be a dud. I bought another edition later. Ah well, I used to own spiderman #1, but my brother took it and I never thought that it would be valuable some day. I can't predict the future.

Neuromancer changed my life. It was a very different book. I had already read "Shock Wave Rider" and "True Names", so I wasn't surprised by the use of computer technology in a Science Fiction novel. Gibson's gritty style just amazed me. It was perfect. It made me want to write SF again. Luckily, I lost the cyberpunk novella that I wrote right after reading Neuromancer - it was pretty awful. I soon realized that Gibson has ruined direct man-machine interface for the rest of us. I used it in Girl with the Error Message Eyes, but I used a cell phone/spam paradigm and avoided Gibson's incredibly rich cyberspace. Vinge's True Names cyberspace is technically more believable, but he lacks the dangerous plot and sweaty tension of Neuromancer.

I don't recommend Neuromancer to anyone. It and the two other books in the series are very complex. I know of few people who will be able to follow Gibson. The book is difficult, to say the least. There are a great many twists and turns in the plot that cannot be put into a movie.

Molly Millions is my favorite woman character in any book. She was totally misunderstood and turned into some kind of femme-ninja in the movie version of Johnny mnemonic, totally ignoring the lovesick sadness she feels for her doomed technical boy Johnny. In Neuromancer, she describes how she finds the love of her life murdered. She has at her heart a deep grief. She is a small lost girl hiding behind mirror shades.

Neuromancer will probably be based on the comic book version that I once saw. I can't imagine capturing 10% of the book in a 2 hour film. It will be full of computer graphics that will try to hide the bad screenplay. The parts of Case and Molly will be played by stone faced actors doing slow motion karate moves. They'll probably have to cut out the part of the Dixie construct. The whole point of the Neuromancer intelligence at the end will be lost without all of the supporting clues. Amitage's dangerously ruined personality will be just a manikin used to move the plot.

I don't go to the movies often and I prefer black and white films from the 1940s to any modern movie that I've ever seen. When Neuromancer comes to one of the free cable channels (within a year, no doubt), I might talk Erica into watching it, but her tolerance for crap is much lower than mine.

Read the book - if you dare!

"Neuromancer" Finally Goes Online

The end of the Digital Era

A group of researchers are claiming that analog computers are potentially more powerful than digital ones. For me this is obvious. Digital means dealing in zeros and ones. Analog means smooth variation from zero to one and all the values in between. In digital, things are true or false, in analog things are all shades of gray. An analog computer can be programmed to provide a solution, but can also provide a range or a class of solutions.

In audio, I prefer vacuum tubes to transistors. The tubes provide a natural low noise level and pleasing harmonics, adding to the richness of music. Music played on a vacuum tube amp sound smoother and more realistic. Music from a digital amplifier sounds sterile and cold. This is not just my opinion, but that of thousands of retro audiophiles who collect old equipment and design new applications using a new generation of tubes and transformers.

I prefer vinyl records to CDs for the same reason. In spite of the tendency for records to accumulate pops, hiss and dirt, they almost always sound better than a CD. The CD digital signal loses some of the subtlety of the original analog recordings and sounds flat and antiseptic compared to the organic feeling you get from vinyl.

Analog devices have played a part in some of my stories. I am currently about half way through a story called The End of the Digital Era. It is a little derivative of a story I once listened to called The Anarchist's Convention, by John Sayles (Read by Jerry Stiller - great!). It was a very funny story about a gang of anarchists holding a convention. They are pushed around by the hotel management and so start a revolution. I thought that aging hackers would be an interesting topic and started writing a story about a Hacker convention in 2035. It features very old hackers who refuse to give up their digital tools in an age when analog devices are coming into their own. The advantage of digital is that building blocks can be created that will fit together easily to make things like CD players or telephones or computers. At some time in the future, MOD (manufacturing on demand) will replace mass production and it will be just as easy to make an analog device as a digital one.

The human brain is analog, not digital. Our senses are analog, not digital. Our world is analog, not digital. I think the digital era is just a phase that will soon fade away, only to remembered by a few die-hard hackers.

EETimes.com - Analog computer trumps Turing model: HAIFA, Israel — Recent developments in computing theory challenge longstanding assumption about digital and analog computing, and suggest that analog computations are more powerful than digital ones.

Stats

J published his stats. He's doing a lot better than I am. These are my paid sales.
SF: 12
Fantasy: 9
Horror: 2
Sword & Sorcery: 4

In addition to this, I have a 20 or more stories in flash contests and other free venues that I don't count, and usually aren't that good. I expect that I made under $100 total sales, which is a little discouraging. There's not much incentive to submit anymore. I used to do it for the glory, but that wore off. I still write a bit, but not as much as did three or four years ago. I have 11 unpublished stories, 4 of which are out waiting to be disparaged by editors. I have about 20 stories that I think are good enough to be finished that are partially written. I have a partially written novel (about 30,000 words) that I really want to go back and work on someday, because it has some of the best stuff that I've ever written in it. I have a 23,000 word novella in the style of H.P. Lovecraft written in the early seventies in longhand, that I think is good enough to type up.

My plan is to retire as early as I can and spend my mornings writing, and then have someone find a trunk of my stuff 100 years after I am dead and finally become famous.

Found in Translation

My previous post was about an author who sounded like he wrote in another language and used some kind of tool to translate into English.

For fun, I tried to translate William Gibson's striking first line from Neuromancer into other languages and back again into English using Alta Vista Babelfish.

Here are the results:

Original Text: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.

English->Korean->English: The up sky of the harbor was color of the television which is regulated in the reverse which dies.

English->Chinese->English: The sky above the port is the television color, is tuned the station which dies to.

English->German->English: The sky over the gate was co-ordinated the color of the television, to a dead station.

English->Italian->English: The sky over the orifice was the color of the television, syntonized to one out of order station.

English->French->English: The sky above the port was the color of the television, granted to a dead station.

English->Russian->English: Sky above the port was the color of television, disposed to the dead station.

Now to mix it up a little.

English->Portuguese->French->Greek->English: The sky above the harbour was the colour of television, her that is regulated in a fruitless post.

Sad Writer Case

I lurk at several writing forums. I enjoy reading about the struggle to publish. The forums have been quiet all this year. There hasn't been much happening. Recently, a new writer started posting over at the AR BBS. I thought that it was a joke, because has some sort of writing impediment. It is a analog of a stutter that makes his sentences seem like they are badly translated from another language. Today he listed a book he published, and googling it, I found a catalog listing with a page from the book. It is self published at Authorhouse. I guess Authorhouse is a vanity press or POD publisher. The text is badly written in a way that is remarkable. It is not readable, but it is fascinating, like watching a multi-car pileup on television. You wince and moan and try to look away, but you can't.

The book is 120 pages and it is listed at Barnes and Noble and Amazon. This is an extreme case, but you can certainly find fault in companies like Authorhouse when they take money from people and then publish something like this. This gives POD a very bad name.

Have you seen any nuclear material? - Pakistan places advertisements regarding 'misplaced' isotopes.

Pakistan has placed ads warning about "Orphan Sources" of nuclear isotopes. The term "Orphan Sources" is from the BoingBoing article and I have dutifully added it to my "idea list" as a possible good sf title.

The disturbing thing is that there must be a reason behind doing this. Are misplaced isotopes common enough in Pakistan that you need to put posters up around town to warn people? No one takes an action like this without a payoff. What is the payoff here?

Another interesting thing is that American pundits seemed to be shocked, shocked that that there are isotopes in Pakistan. Politicians are making fumbling announcements that mostly question the wisdom of putting up the poster. Why aren't they questioning why there is a need for the poster?

I have my emergency pack ready, including instructions to my brother's house in Rochester. I expect a dirty bomb any day now, but I am not sure that New York is an imminent target. I would not live in Tel Aviv for any amount of money. It is only a matter of time, now.

I read a story in a 1948 Astounding Magazine about terrorists who smuggle nuclear material into New York City on the dials of thousands of cheap glow-in-the-dark watches. They make it through customs because, although radioactive, it is at a low level of radioactivity and watches with radium dials are expected to be slightly radioactive. The terrorists scrape off the glow material, dissolve it in solvents, and let the fissionable material settle to the bottom. This was a story from 1948, proving my thesis that good science fiction is ahead of its time by 50 years on the average.

My friend John is writing a techno-terrorism thriller. I have talked to him about the watches. I just thought of another way to get fissionable material into the country. Uranium is used as a yellow die in glass and glazes. You can make a rich gold color or a pale green-yellow color from uranium salts. This is no longer done in because the uranium is toxic, but stained glass used to have a uranium salt added to it to make a golden yellow sun tone. Typically the glass contains uranium in concentrations of 1%. If you bumped that up and made glass, you could create stained glass masterpieces. The radiation detectors would pick it up, but the coast guard or customs would let it through because it could be shown that the radiation came from the glass. The trick would be to include pellets of pure fissionable material embedded in the lead that holds the stained glass in place. The uranium glass would be the red herring, masking the pellets hidden in the lead.


news @ nature.com - Have you seen any nuclear material? - Pakistan places advertisements regarding 'misplaced' isotopes.

David Bowie and Paul McCartney's alien concert

This does sound like the basis of really bad SF story.

Sir Paul McCartney, David Bowie and Michael Jackson are set to make contact with aliens, claims author Michael C. Luckman.

The acts, along with Sir Elton John and The Rolling Stones, have been lined up to headline a series of concerts aimed at establishing peaceful contact with aliens by beaming music into outer space.

Now, here is what I found trying to find the source of this story. Why doesn't this surprise me?

Mick Jagger says he saw a UFO

"In 1968 he went camping in Glastonbury with his then girlfriend, singer Marianne Faithful, and encountered a rare, luminous cigar-shaped mothership.

"Around the same time Mick had a UFO detector installed at his British estate. The alarm kept on going off whenever he left home, indicating the presence of strong electromagnetic activity in the immediate area."

The 63-year-old singer also sighted a UFO over the crowd during The Rolling Stones' infamous 1969 Altamont Concert in California.

Mick is not the only member of the band to believe in aliens. Guitarist Keith Richards has also admitted to "seeing a few".

He had a UFO detector installed in his house? What the hell is a UFO detector?

Time waster

J had one of these annoying images on his web site and I made the mistake of clicking on it and then going through the whole Megillah to get it. The name of the website is meez.com and it is a nifty flash site that does some interesting 3D animation on the fly. They don't have the basic 56 years of beer body type, but other than that it has gray eyes, brown hair (I didn't see a place to add the gray streak) and wire frame glasses.

At nearly 300K, it is a little much for my website, which is already over-large. Click on the image to see the full size one.

I was interested in how they did things, but then I saw that they had a harmonica as a prop and I had to go with it - damn J!

Stupid Job on GURU

I check guru.com for jobs. I have never been able to compete there. Most of the jobs go to Indians, but I like to see what people are interested in doing. I sometimes get ideas for my own projects. I see a lot of "clone myspace" or "clone flickr" jobs. Very few people ask for anything new and I have never seen a really good idea come out of these requests. Still it is interesting.

Here's a really stupid job that I just saw. Check the typos. The whole concept is silly. You can't prevent DVD piracy through software.

Project title:	DVD Anty Piracy Software
Employer location:	Denver, CO - USA
Description:	I need to a piece of software that will give my DVD's some kind of protection agains illegal cuterfitting.

I wonder what kind of responses he gets? Cuterfitting sounds like it might be making galoshes for fish or lederhosen for goats.

Fiddle Heads

You know it's spring when you can buy fiddle head ferns. They are the curly top of ferns and I steam them and they taste sweet and crunchy and nice with almost any dish. They are only available for a couple of weeks in the spring and they are hard to find.

I bought mine at Whole Foods on my lunch hour. The store is about a mile or so from where I work and there is a steep hill, so going to the health food store is healthy in and of itself.

The weather was summery, but not too hot, and it was the first day of the season where I caught site of that must wonderful of magical creatures: girls without bras.

The Couch-to-5K Running Plan

I never did learn how to run after an incompetent nurse paralyzed my leg with a misplaced hypodermic shot when I was 5 years old. I walk fine. My leg is fine, but somewhere in my recovery, I never relearned how to run. The best that I can do is a funny sort of fast shuffle thing that feels unnatural and tires me out almost immediately. During the six months that I was bedridden or using crutches, I taught myself to read (with my parents help) and I read everything in the house. If I hadn't had to stick around in a boring bedroom with my books, I might have become a jock and a more socially acceptable person, but I never would have come to love books the way that I do. As it is, I don't really like sports (baseball in October, perhaps, and maybe a good basketball game on a big screen in a bar, once or twice a year, but that's it.) I prefer the quiet comfort of a good read to actual human contact.

When I list my regrets in life, though, and I have many, I list not being able to run right after not being able to sing.

That's why I am jealous of Erica and her running plan. She found this web page that helps you get back into running. We've been walking around Rockland lake after work and she takes off running for a minute or two and I have to struggle to walk fast enough to catch her, but as soon as I do, she takes off again and I have to watch her bounding away from me.

This plan, so far, seems to be working for Erica. She is determined person. It's rare that one of the self-help web pages actually works for someone. I have no doubts, however that Erica will be running the whole 5K around the lake, while I plod along feeling lonely and sorry for myself.

Cool Running :: The Couch-to-5K Running Plan

Blake's 7 Audio

I've been listening to these Blake's 7 audio versions of the TV show on cable. They are rather good. They are quite short so that I can listen to them in spurts at work.

The growth of technology implies a singularity, but for Science Fiction to be interesting there has to be a limit to the technology. You can't write a story about two super computers talking to each other.

A good way to limit the tech and enhance the humanity is to have progress halted by war, religion or politics. Blake's 7 uses politics. Earth is run by a totalitarian government that suppresses freedom and stifles technology. There is lots of neat tech stuff, but progress has been halted at a nice level where human interaction with machines is still where the people are in charge and things don't fix themselves. Good stuff. Now if I could only talk Erica into watching this instead of Disparate Housewives.


Science Fiction TV Series - Cast, Characters, Episodes - Blake's 7

Philip K. Dick's Eyes

I was trying to come up with a Banner for ScienceFictional.com, and I found an image of Philip P. Dick's robot (which I think is still missing). I animated its eyes through simple JavaScript. It's not a good banner, but I had fun for 20 minutes making it work. The subject header should be how to kill a lunch hour. Now I'm hungry and don't have time to run out and grab a sandwich.

I am Blocked

Evidently, China has blocked my blog. I don't know why. I tend to think that this testing website is blocked and showing everything as blocked.

It would be sad to think that hundreds of millions of Chinese surfers can not read the meaningless twaddle that I post here.

Great Firewall of China | Test websites

E.M. Forster Quote

I'm reading E. M. Forster Aspects of the Novel. Some cool, some interesting, much you skip over. There is one great quote about half way through where he is talking about Homo Fictus as opposed to Homo Sapiens.

If God could tell the history of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.

Worth the quarter that I paid for the book just for that quote.

Geoff Hartwell on SNL

I've blogged about the Geoff Hartwell Band and their Jam in Pleasantville, NY on one of my harmonica sites, JT30.com. I've even jammed there back in the days when I could find time for such things. Geoff is the son of David Hartwell who edits one of the major Best-Of Science Fiction anthologies. He is also a wicked good guitar player. His picture appears as the naked hippy dude in the Saturday Night Live skit from last year that played again last night. I've seen this skit before, because I watch a little late night TV before I go to bed, and I thought that it was, like most SNL bits, a waste of the Electro-Magnetic Bandwidth used to transmit it.

SNL, however, is just a little more interesting, now that a fellow Blues dude has a cameo in it.

My Laptop is Back

I got my Laptop back. It's the one on the left. As you can see the little Panasonic that I have been using is very little. I now have a nice large keyboard with an American layout. The larger Gateway is slower and does not have a built in wifi connection. The power supply is still funky, but at least the battery charges now. I am ordering a new power brick on eBay.

The Panasonic now goes into its bag and I won't be using it again, unless I go on vacation or have to commute to the city again. I have a Compaq that is even larger faster and cooler, but Justine lost the power brick so it is not very useful. I have not found a power brick for the Compaq on eBay.

The Girl with the Error Message Eyes

I posted this second-life screen capture last year. I thought that it was a great story idea. I finished the story today and shipped it off. The story is deeply emotional and there's hardly any action. It's about the relationship of a couple who lose a son in an Iraq-like war and encounter the son's strange girlfriend. I don't think the story will find a home any time soon.

Now part that I hate - the long deadly wait....................

E. Jim Shannon on Robert J. Sawyer's Blog

This picture is from Robert J. Sawyer's Blog. Jim went to see him speak. That's Jim in the front right.

Jim is now the most famousest reader of my blog.

Mr. Shannon has a toothache. Feel better man - get that thing pulled or capped or whatever.

While I was working at IBM, I broke a tooth badly and it had to be capped. The IBM dental plan was pretty good, but I paid an extra hundred dollars to get a gold cap. I always wanted a gold tooth and this one is back in my mouth a bit so you can only see it when I grin broadly. I highly recommend a gold cap to anyone who needs that kind of work. The gold is much more stable than porcelain and it is more compatible with the tissue of the mouth. The gold lasts longer and has few problems.

Peter S. Beagle in Central Park

Peter S. Beagle is up for Nebula award. I read the Last Unicorn when it first came out and it is the only unicorn story that is a true exception to my Science Fiction Writing Law #7.

On the Sunday after the awards banquet, Peter will be hanging out in Central Park. I haven't been to the City in a while and I thought that I would go check it out. There may just be a bunch of crazy SF people there, but I have always had good luck in the park. I will think about going if the weather is nice.

Here's what Peter said in his newsletter:

On the day AFTER the Banquet — Sunday, May 13th — all of you living within reach of New York City are invited to join me for a bring-your-own-whatever picnic in Central Park. Assuming we aren't rained out, it will start at 11 AM and last a couple of hours. Location? The open lawn immediately between the Great Lawn and Belvedere Lake, AKA the Turtle Pond: see the map below. Theme? Celebration, of course — either of winning that darned Nebula (dream on, Beagle), or of the simple gift of good company.

I hope to see many of you there.

(click image for larger version)

Rejects

Last month I went through my story trunk and sent out a bunch of previously rejected stories. These aren't just stories that I haven't sold yet, they are stories where multiple editors have passed on them. One has been rejected 25 times. Since I stopped submitting stories last year, there are a whole new bunch of zines that have not seen these stories, so I gave them a try. As I suspected, there is a vast conspiracy among editors and they discuss these stories behind my back and laugh about me. So far they have all come back rejected.

One story is a parody of the kind of bad stories that I used to see on Smeerp. I originally titled it Crayfish! I Hate Crayfish. It is a kind of multilevel story about a bad writer trying to pander to a certain market but always creating the same story, no matter how many times the story is changed and rewritten. I rewrote it slightly and called it Squid! I Hate Squid! and I sent it to Space Squid. Since it is not so much a story as a funny idea about writers and stories with a recursive ending, there is no real market for it. Space Squid is the only market that I figure would get it.

Here is what Matthew Bey wrote back:

thank you for taking the extra effort to make your story pandering to us specifically. while i enjoyed this story, i felt that it was either not pandering enough, or not over the top zany enough. one or the other.

I'm not a zany guy, neither do I pander well. These, perhaps, are good qualities.

Since there is zero chance of this ever being published, you may read the story here: Squid! I Hate Squid!

Feedback on Story of the Day

I decided to give some for-the-love-of sites a break and include a few of their stories on the blog. Unfortunately, one of these stories, although a good idea, was not that well executed and hit the blog just as I received a ton of traffic from SFSignal.com. A few self appointed critics had some not-so-nice things to say about the story. I tried to make it clear that the the blog will have links to all kinds of SF stories. I am including links from as many websites as I can find. There are bound to be stories that are not well received. I may have made a mistake by following a Hugo Award nominee with a story from a free site.

J and Jim both have stories coming up. Jim's first story received 20 or so clicks, but so far no comment. I was going to slip one of my stories in, but now I am having second thoughts. I don't take criticism well, especially the sarcastic variety.

USA Laptop Repair

A few years ago, Justine sent me one of her old Laptops. It was a very nice machine with a big wide screen and some nice bells and whistles. I used it for a couple of years, blogging and writing from the Lazy Boy while watching TV. The letters on the keyboard are wearing off.

Last Fall, Ollie, the frenetic orange tabby cat, knocked it off the couch and it fell to the floor and broke off the power plug inside the box. I tried to open the box but I could not figure out how to get at the mother board to fix the plug. There has to be some trick to it. I have several other laptop computers that Justine has given up on, so I set the broken one aside. It's a nice machine and I thought it a waste that I wasn't using it.

I searched for depot laptop repair and found that the broken plug is the most common laptop repair. Most places charge around $140 to fix it. That was six months ago. Last week, while searching eBay for something else, I found USA Laptop Repair. It's an RD address in Visalia California, so I figure it's a clever guy in a garage making beer money. It only costs $75. I mailed it last Saturday and this morning (Wednesday) he notified me that it was fixed and he was shipping it back. It looks like the turnaround will be less than a week. You can't beat that. By using eBay, I have recourse to the eBay feedback system, providing some safety. I am sure that the laptop will arrive in good condition with a good working power jack, and Dan will be getting positive feedback.

Here's the note he sent this morning:

Hi Keith your laptop is on it's way back. I repaired the jack. There was also a lot of cat hair or something in it which I cleaned out. I noticed your power adapter's plug is nearly worn out so you may have to replace that at some point.
Thanks again and please mention my service to anyone who is interested!
Dan

I wonder where the cat hair came from?

Please use this link: USA Laptop Repair

Their website is www.USALapTopRepair.com, but it you intend to use eBay, please click on the link above. It is an affiliate link and I make a few pennies by referring you to eBay when you order the service. It costs you nothing.

Where is Everyone?

It has been a beautiful spring day. I am at Rockland Community College waiting to teach my Web Design class. It is the last class before the final exam. I got here at 6:00pm to help any students who are nervous about the projects or the test. It is now exactly 6:30 and there are only 3 students out of the 16. Another one just walked in.

Where are these people, don't they know that I go over the test on the next-to-last night? Do they want to fail the course? I'll give them a couple of minutes and then I'll start teaching.

One thing about just a few students is there are fewer questions and I can probably finish up a half hour early.

I am not Mac person, but I am blogging on a nice Mac using an old version of firefox on the school's deadly slow network. I don't find the Mac OS any trouble at all, though, and I would not mind owning one. I have much more experience in Windows, and many of my tools are Windows based, but I am sure there are some good alternatives in the Mac world.

6:38 and I have 7 students - time to start work.

30 HTML and CSS Job Interview Questions

There are very few places on the web to find HTML and CSS interview questions.
I have collected a few dozen at my RCC Web Design Class Page. Some of the answers need to be tweeked. When I get time, I will see what I can do to make them conform to the w3c party line.

30 HTML and CSS Job Interview Questions