Harvard

My friend Eric Parker has been emailing and calling everyone he knows.

His son Ari got into Harvard (as well as Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and about 10 other schools).

That's Ari on the left. He's a good kid and jams on the Sax with his Dad and my brother when they perform in Nyack.

Eric could not be prouder.

Congratulations Eric....

and, oh yeah, congratulations Ari.

New Template - Very techy

Way too techy - don't read if you are looking for cats. I put some pictures of Gracie on the cat blog. (Hover over the "other sites" link above and click on the cat blog.)

Damn - it's not working in IE - I have to try to fix it.

I wrote a simple javascript an css menu at work for one of my projects and I applied it to some of my blogs. You can see it by hovering over the menu links under the heading above. It drops down a bunch of links and makes the blog more readable in that there is no longer any right hand column.

The webring code is screwy, but I am going to drop the webring. It was a good idea, but the coders at webring put a DIV aroundd the code that screws up any css based design.

I am going to start up my technical blog again, but I am not going to do it with posts. I will just hand craft topics when I get around to it. I can't keep up with the blogs that I have.

Earth Hour and My Wood Stove

March 29, 2008 during Earth Hour, I turned off all the lights and just watched the old Jotul #6 burning a couple of logs. Here's a YouTube video of the fire. It was nice.

Rudy Rucker on POD Publishing

I have always thought that publishing your own book was a last resort. I have never gone the final mile to POD and self publishing on any of my collections because it would be admitting defeat. I felt that finding an audience without the distribution channels of a large publishing house would be impossible and I would never sell more than a few dozen books.

I may be wrong about POD (publish on demand).

I regularly read Rudy Rucker's blog and I think of him as one the writers on my Top Ten Science Fiction Writers list that I have yet to compile. It turns out that his Wares books are doing well and he can get them reprinted at a big house, his other books are more problematic. This is downright silly. He is a good writer and an excellent read. I have half a dozen books of his on my shelves and I have even paid for some his stories and lectures on tape.

It seems outrageous that Rudy Rucker would have to go the POD route, but Rudy writes:

"I’ve been thinking about options for making some of my out of print novels available again. There’s still some hope I can get a mainstream publisher to reissue the four books in my Ware series, but my other out of print books are more problematic. I’m thinking of Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere in particular, and maybe eventually The Secret of Life, which is available only in ebook form."

The blog entry lists many of his options eBooks, LuLu, Lighting Source and Amazon BookSurge and Kindle. It would be cool if SamsDotPublishing.com could get Rudy to let them handle some of his books. J has published his books on Kindle and using Lighting Source and probably LuLu. Tyree pushes the SamsDot books relentlessly at the conventions and the editors at SamsDot are all just plain nice people. (I lurk on their discussion board.)

If Rudy Rucker can't get his books, and he has a name, then what chance is there for the rest of us. It looks like POD is not the last resort that I thought it was, but perhaps the only resort, even if you are writing Pro quality stuff.

It is time to start really working on my Indian Publishing Scheme.

Rudy’s Blog

Found in Junk

I found this very cute little Mac with the monitor built in on the side of the road. It is an iMac G3 333mhz with 64mb memory and a 6 gig disk. It is pristine and was used by a little kid who played card games.

I am going to see if I can plug a USB terrabyte hard drive into it and connect it to the network. From what I've read it will not be too hard, but may be a little slow. I may have to load it with MacLinux but it will be interesting.

I wanted to get a $38 network slug and put Linux on it, but they are harder to come by than you'd think. My order was back ordered with no word of when they will be in stock again.

I also wanted to get one of those routers that you can reprogram so they will mount network drives, but they are too expensive.

Next week is cleanup week when everyone puts their bigger junk out. I will be taking the long way home every night and I hope to find more cool things.

Scott and his Cat Tiger

I spent part of yesterday and a good part of today getting PHP to work correctly on my XP box and then on a county server running 2003. I discovered that the way to make it not work is to use the install packages provided by the PHP people. You have to hand craft the install.

Hand crafting leaves lots of room for typos and forgotten steps. I have it down pat now, but I will most likely forget most of it in a month or so. I'm writing down the gotchas for future reference.

The hinky part of the install was to configure it to connect to all the databases around here. We have mostly Oracle, but there are DB2 and MS SQL Server dbs. There are also Paradox and other odd databases around, not to mention MS Access.

Oracle fought back, but I drilled through it and I now have both Oracle 10g and Oracle 11g connections to all the test and applications servers here. There is a server running Oracle 8g that I had trouble with, but I even found a way around that.

I wrote a test page to read some data from each of the databases as I tested them. It extracted the EMP table off of the SCOTT user space.

Every Oracle database that I've worked on, and I started with Oracle 3, has had a user name SCOTT with a password of TIGER. It contains some simple tables for testing and learning SQL commands. I learned Oracle from the SCOTT/TIGER database.

It never occurred to me until today to ask who Scott was.

I googled Scott tiger oracle and this is what I found:

Bruce Scott was one of the first employees at Oracle (then Software Development Laboratories). He co-founded Gupta Technology (now known as Centura Software) in 1984 with Umang Gupta, and later became CEO and founder of PointBase, Inc. Bruce was co-author and co-architect of Oracle V1, V2 and V3. The SCOTT schema (EMP and DEPT tables), with password TIGER, was created by him. Tiger was the name of his cat.

Java - the Kiss of Death - Error 500

I am beginning to despise Java and all of its incredibly complex implementations.

Here is a screen dump from My-Cast.com weather. My-Cast is a nice service that sends you weather alerts an I check it each morning for the weekend outlook. The site has maybe 6 or 7 Java JSP pages. Today I got a 500 dump - not even a custom error message from the amateurish coders on the site.

My question is why would you use an EJB on a website with only a few pages? Why would you choose a slow top-heavy technology like Java to do a simple thing like display a couple of records from a database?

You use Java for large enterprise applications where you have teams of coders who need to create tools and integrate them. You don't use it for lightweight "select and spit" web pages. I could have done the entire My-Cast site in a PHP in an afternoon.

I have been saying this for a while and it makes me no friends. Just remember YouTube is entirely coded in PHP. If YouTube were coded in Java, it would crashed and burned years ago or else the hardware resource costs, along with the salaries of a large staff of programmers would have made it too expensive to run.

Digg, one of the most popular sites on the nets uses PHP running on a handful of servers.

If you care to be techy today, read this about Java and PHP. It has links to some of the battles in the flame war between the Java and PHP camps.

Asimov on Global Warming - 1989

This is why Science Fiction writers should make all of the big decisions. I'm not in 100% agreement with everything, but I have total respect for his reasoning. He makes more sense than anyone speaking out today.



Notice, he speaks without notes as far as I can tell.

More of this talk

Ada Lovelace Painting bought on eBay

Someone bought an original painting of Ada Lovelace on eBay. Ada was the daughter of George Gordon Lord Byron, the English romantic poet. She was a mathematician (unusual for a woman at that time) and she was purportedly the lover of Charles Babbage who designed a steam powered difference engine. Babbage's machine, although never completed was a real modern computer in every way, capable of programming, loops, branches, input and output. Ada, supposedly wrote the first ever computer programs. She is the first hacker.

Up to this time, there were few known original paintings of Ada and the modern representations of her are all copies of copies from copies in books and magazines of the time.

Many working versions of the Babbage difference engine have been built and there are several good emulator programs on the web. At the time, the steel that was available to Babbage and his mechanic was too soft and they had problems with the machine jamming all the time. The design was good, but the stress on the rods and gears was too much for the brass and steel of the time. I think that good steel was available, but it was probably too difficult to work. Probably the tolerances on the gear trains which had virtual lengths of miles, might have contributed to the problems. Babbage produced small working models of parts of his engine, but the complete one was not completed before he went bankrupt.

Legend has it that Ada and Charles used the parts of the engine to calculate the odds at horse racing. Ada sold her jewels to bet heavily on several races. Unfortunately, races at the time (as is true now) had little to with mathematics and much to do with behind the scenes manipulation of races, horses and payouts. They lost everything.

"Ada Lovelace, formally known as Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace is credited with creating the world’s first computer program for the Babbage steam-powered calculating engine. The United States military named their Ada programming language after her and her portrait is used in some Microsoft hologram stickers."

Domains Expiring

I am letting several domains expire. Some I don't want and some I don't have time for. I am letting Smeerp.com go. I am going to let Astoundme.com go and I am thinking that BlogsEye.com and BlogsEyeView.com should go. One of them is the Cat Blog, but I have been putting cat pictures here, on this blog.

I am dropping ScienceFictional.com and it will go away at the end of the month. I tried several things with ScienceFictional, but it didn't take off. I love the name, but I don't have time for it.

AstoundingTales.com, AstoundingStories and AstoundingScienceFiction will expire this summer and I will not renew them. AstoundingTales was a great name for an ezine, but AstoundingStories and AstoundingScienceFiction had legal issues with the owners of the original magazine claiming that they had rights to the name. AstoundingTales or AstoundingStories would be a great names for a blog as long as you didn't try to publish SF using the name.

This will save me about $70 a year. None of these sites makes me any money or ever did. I currently have 46 domains, which is way too many. I can't get rid of the money makers, but the experimental sites and the Spec Fic sites can go without ever being missed.

If you want any of these domains I can transfer them to your registrar. You need a registrar account (like namebargain or godaddy). It usually doesn' t cost anything except the first year's registration which is under $10 most places.

Smeerp.com
Astoundme.com
BlogsEye.com
BlogsEyeView.com
ScienceFictional.com
AstoundingTales.com
AstoundingStories.com
AstoundingScienceFiction.com

Peter S. Beagle

Peter S. Beagle sends out a newsletter from time to time. Among other things there is a new audio book of The Last Unicorn.

The picture is Peter's cat:

Finn, the RAVEN office wondercat, has different-colored eyes. Turns out they glow in the dark differently, too...spooky!

Jack Lelanne

When I was a kid, Jack used to be on TV. For years he was on reruns. In an age of obscenely pumped up steroid giants, Jack looks like just a really fit guy, but at the time, he was a "muscle man". I am sure Jack never used any kind of hormone supplement or unnatural additive to make him strong. He just ate well and worked out. This is something we can all do. Watching Jack talk about his personal philosophy is almost a religious experience.

Jack is on some commercial on TV lately and seeing him in his prime and again in his 90s just makes you smile.

13 Great Ghost Movies on Squidoo

Please click on the link below and vote for your favorite ghost story.

This is a Squidoo lens. My Squidoo lense actually makes a few cents. I am even thinking of writing a few more. I need some hits to keep it in the top 10% on Squidoo. The page has started to slip a little lately.

You can make a lens on any subject. It has to be about 1000 words. Lists are best because people tend to click on "Top 22 Bread Recipes" or "Top 10 reasons NOT to quit smoking". Politics is hot and opinions matter more than facts. I have to write a couple of more. On the internet everything is about "Shelf Space" the more of your stuff that you have out there, the more money you make. Squidoo.com actually seems to work. You can even create links to Amazon with your own Affiliate ID - I've had two sales, totaling about a dollar in March, so far.

Erica, I expect you to compose a "10 ways to Keep a Cat off your Keyboard". John B. I expect you to write "The Top 20 Reasons why the Neocons will (probably) Fail". eJim, I expect you to write up "The 10 worst games in the History of the Edmonton Oilers". J, I expect you will need to do very little research for "The 10 Worst Jobs in Denver".

Let me know when you write them and I will link to your lenses here.

13 Great Ghost Movies on Squidoo

Awareness Test

Count the passes - what did you miss?

Cost of Commuting - or not Telecommuting

I have been adding up the costs of commuting. I have to pay for parking in White Plains, NY. I have to pay tolls on the TZ Bridge. I have to pay for 30 miles worth of gas every day. I have to pay $1 a cup for weak coffee. I have to pay for wear and tear on the truck. I can't work in my underwear so I have to pay for clothes.

Adding this up and adjusting for before Tax income, it comes to about $9,000 a year that I contribute towards this job. Much of that, except for parking and tolls, I would pay on most any job, but it is a strong argument for finding a work at home job. Homemade Starbucks costs about 35¢ cup.

CraigsList has a telecommute check box when you do job searches. At one time I found a Telecommute job search engine, but a search now just finds work-at-home scam sites. I am going to add the CraigsList NY telecommute job search to my morning start-up web group. I think that working at home would be a good thing for the cats. They get tired of just Erica every day. Also, I could go to the Friday Garage Sales, as long as I got my work done.

Sources of real telecommute jobs and freelance gigs.

Craigslist.org - Real jobs, but there is no checking so watch out for scams. Don't send anyone money!

WWWAC.org Mailing List. (much lower volume than it used to be, but still 4 or 5 good jobs a month.)

Guru.com - I've never got a gig from here due to competition with India and Eastern Europe, but I still keep trying.

eLance.com - like Guru. I see lots of good gigs, especially writing gigs, but the competition is fierce.

Watch out for the websites that have work at home or telecommute in the domain name. It looks like they are mostly from the same scam.

Years ago, I bookmarked the Monster List of Freelance Job Sites. This is still a good site to check out, but it seems that there is way too much information here.

Are We Facing End Of Futurism?

With the death of Arthur C. Clarke, we have lost a great writer
and perhaps the last real futurist.

This blogger speculates that there are no great writers speculating, really speculating, about the future. There's plenty of SF set in some future world, but not much of it is innovative. For instance, I just finished reading 11 books in the Honor Harrington series and they are just simple short term extrapolations on what is here and now projected to some future where everything has evolved a bit, but nothing much has changed. They are decent reads, but full of padding. each book could have been a few chapters in a tightly written novel, rather than a fat 500 page novel.

The future, as I have said many times, is Revolutionary, not Evolutionary. Extrapolation is a waste of time. Spec Fic writers have to consider the unanticipated in order to write good science fiction. Fiction that is merely extrapolative is merely space opera. Any one who believes that tomorrow can be predicted by the conditions in the present is either stupid or a Republican.

Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein, under John W. Campbell, Jr.'s guidance produced an extraordinary variety of possible futures, very few of them like the present. With the movement towards Mundane SF and Slipstream, this kind of story is rare. Some of it that you do find, like Rudy Rucker's current novel, are a hard read and not the kind of romantic word candy that undereducated, TV fed, readers prefer anymore. Rucker, along with Bruce Sterling and a few others might be considered The Futurists - Next Generation, but they don't have broad appeal or readership.

I hesitated to add my thoughts on the passing of Clarke. As J pointed out, his short stories were better than his novels. I have a worn out copy of Tales From the White Hart somewhere and it is the inspiration for my own series of Tales from the Silver Streak. I had to read Childhood's End in High School and I found it tame compared to some of the other stuff that I was reading, so for a long time a pigeon-holed Clarke as a light weight. It wasn't until ten years later that I found the short stories and I raised my opinion of him. 2001, a Space Odyssey is a great movie, but not so much a novel as a series of speculative episodes strung together on a theme. It is not typical of his short stories and I think the Rama novels were attempts at recreation of the vast themes of the movie. I also wonder how much of the last novels were written by others under the Clarke brand, much the way James Michener had a staff of writers that he would manage, polishing their work, and presenting it as his own.

It is interesting that the link above goes to a Croatian website and blogger. I browsed his blog and the guy is smart and a good read. His point about the end of futurism is well taken and I thought it was the right approach to the death of the last of the great futurists from the golden age of SF.

Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and Sturgeon sold their first stories to Campbell in the Summer of 1939. I think that The Summer of '39 might make an interesting title for an essay or even a short story.

March 17th - Day of Strange Power

St. Patrick's Day is a significant day in my life.

On March 17th 1975 I was fired from my job at a savings and loan. I worked at a variety of odd jobs for the next year, including working at a Summer Stock theater. I worked painting houses and mixed mortar for a mason. I worked the 12 midnight to 6AM shift as a cashier at a diner. Every weekend Erica and I loaded up the trunk of the old Nova with junk from auctions and rented a table at a flea market. The local auctions would have an "everything in the box" sale to warm up the audience. They were just junk, but you could sell 20 things from a box that cost a couple of bucks for about $20 if you priced them separately. We also bought large bulk packaged disposable diapers and repackaged them. We would make about $20 a case. In the slow periods, I would read Tarot cards. There wasn't a week that went by where I didn't make more money just scrambling than I did when I was working regularly. This was the best time of my life.

On March 17th 1976 I was hired at Orange and Rockland Utilities. I learned to program computers on their nickel and I started making money consulting on the side.

On March 17th 1983, I quite O&R and went to work for Western Union, where I really learned to program.

On March 17th 1984 I left Western Union to work for St. Regis Paper Company as a member of their Computer support group teaching executives how to use spreadsheets.

On March 17th 1986 I started at Lockheed as the manager of their microcomputer group. I wrote a lot of programs including the first versions of the EZ-Pass system used on many highways.

On March 17th 2000, I left Lockheed to work for IBM as a high paid consultant.

On March 17th 2002, after being caught in a major layoff at IBM, I took a job for a year working Java code on Wall Street, NY. It was a nice job where I took the water shuttle around Manhattan to the foot of Wall Street every day. On the minus side, I had to work near Ground Zero, where so many people died.

On March 17th 2003, I was hired by The County of Westchester as a low paid consultant, but I didn't start until April 1. It was a three month gig and I've been here for just about five years. It is time to change.

I am waiting to see what happens today. I have a slight chance at being hired by a network news website to write a PC column. I applied last week, but I have a feeling that there may be quite a few other applicants. It is probably too soon, but I hope that I might hear today, just because the Mojo is so powerful on St. Patty's day.

Free Flash Memory from IBM

Click on the link below and leave your contact info at IBM and they will send you a 512MB USB flash drive. These are darn useful little guys. I use them to transfer data from machine to machine. I keep the Work In Progress of a couple of short stories on one in case I get the urge to write. You can also keep your Firefox bookmarks on it. I have put some music on one to listen to at work. Like I say, darn useful - and FREE!

IBM: Reduce energy costs. Maximize greenness