Alan Garner - The Owl Service

I bought a couple of cartons of books from Forest J. Ackerman's Garage Mahal garage sale. Forey was moving and getting rid of his books. I bought some lots where there was at least one book that I was interested in. The other books were an odd mixture of whatever was on hand.

Since I've been reading during my commute, I have been trying to find books to read. I have read most of the books that I own and I don't want to spend much on new books if possible. I've been looking in eBay for odd lots, but so far nothing looks good.

Most of the odd books in the Ackerman lots had titles like "Book 3 of the Magic Ring of the Dragon Wizard" or some such garbage. I don't want to even try to read these. I will be creating a site where I will trade books or send out books at a minimal cost for mailing.

One book that I tried to read was The Owl Service by Alan Garner. This is a book about magic in Wales. It has lots of talk and nothing much happens. The text is well written, even beautiful in some passages, but it never grabbed me. I am not the intended audience. I like fantasy, but I need a little tension in the plot, but not this endless examination of the internal reactions of uninteresting people.

This is the first book on my commute that I decided that it was a waste of time to finish. Life is too short.

Anyone want it? I'll send it out media mail for $1 (payment through paypal). It would be better to wait as I will put together a box and weigh it, soon.

Signed Murray Leinster

I sometimes think that I am channeling Murray Leinster's ghost. Will Jenkins, A.K.A. Murray Leinster was one of the most prolific short story writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He wrote what I consider to be the quintessential Science Fiction story: First Contact. This book, Sideways in Time, has what has to be the most anthologized SF story of all time - A Logic Named Joe, which is probably the first modern story of artificial intelligence.

Here's an eBay auction for a signed version of one of his books. Only 82 bucks, but money is tight and that's a lot for a book.

Murray Leinster Sidewise in Time Signed First in Dj - eBay (item 230274477997 end time Aug-02-08 13:19:15 PDT)

Nine Legendary SF Authors Speak

This, via SFSignal, is a video of 9 great SF writers. It dates from the late 1960s to the late 1970s and has some of my favorite writers explaining why SF is important.

A nice quote from Asimov:

To those of us who remember the golden age, we are now living in a Sciencefictional world, and one which Campbell's Science Fiction did significantly succeed in creating.

It is unfortunate that, even in 30 to 40 years ago, these writers are speaking as though Science Fiction has completed its function in society. They speak about fulfilling a promise, as though Spec-fic is done deal and the future is now.

Riddle

Raised in the mountains and wild ravines,
I have become the herald of hymns that are sung.
I have no articulate voice, but still my voice is melodious.

I found this quite by accident. It is a riddle from the Planudean anthology of problems and riddles, Chapter 7, #65. I don't have the answer. I have a guess at what it might be.

Please leave your guesses in the comments.

Keith Laumer - A Plague of Demons

Keith Laumer wrote intense often humorous Science Fiction in the 1960s and 70s. He was prolific and I remember him mostly as a good Short Story writer as he appeared frequently in the SF magazines of the 1960s. I can remember reading several of his Retief Stories in Astounding and Analog.

A Plague of Demons was published in 1964 in IF Magazine and then as Berkley Medallion Paperback in 1965. I remember that the Berkley Medallion books cost 50 cents, which was more than the 35 cent Ace books, but they were higher quality and more adult in content so I preferred them.

The book appeared when Ian Fleming's James Bond books were popular, and A Plague of Demons is a SF version of a spy thriller. Set in a futuristic world, an agent discovers that men are disappearing from the battlefields of earth and have been doing so since at least World War I. In some of the battles as many as 20% of the armies are missing in action. The agent stumbles upon an alien plot to steal human brains and use them as computers in mechanized battle wagons on distant planets. He enters into an underworld of espionage where no one will believe him except a retarded young man who can see the aliens.

The agent is eventually caught and his brain placed in a war machine, but he "wakes up" and finds that he must battle the aliens as a secret agent in their own army.

This was fast paced and action packed. Some of it is a little over the top and the main character is stock Science Fiction hero (Male, White, 30 and extremely intelligent - nothing wrong with that - I was 30 once). The book is nicely partitioned into two parts marked by a cliff hanger where the magazine would have serialized it. It is a good read and I finished in one and a half days thanks to a problem on the TZ bridge this morning.

There are a few nice sciencefictional ideas, but nothing that original. 1) Using brains of humans, cats and dogs to control machinery. 2) a secret society started by Benjamin Franklin that has been responsible for the survival of the United States. 3) Aliens among us that only children, dogs, cats, and people with a certain kind of brain damage can see. 4) Relentless alien hive minds that sweep across the galaxies conquering everything in their way.

In spite of being a great book to spend a few hours with, it had no real redeeming value and all the action and excitement is little more than empty calories. Some images were very familiar and I may have read it before, but the plot, although interesting, is very forgettable. The characters do not stick with you and the conflict is almost purely physical.  The cover, on the other hand, is very good. It was from a period when publishers put real art on the cover of Science Fiction books. Today they just put cartoons on covers, it seems.

Health and Diet

I've been talking to John B. about vitamins, diet and health. This is usually a personal issue and I've learned over the years not to nag people about what they eat.

It has reached the point where the food supply is toxic enough to think twice before eating. It goes without question that meals from fast food chains are usually little more than salty grease laced with bovine growth hormones. Beef, pork and poultry from the supermarket is not much better.

I am a person who likes to eat and it is difficult to decide what I should do.

I have not eaten beef since February. This was a huge leap for me because I like steak and I enjoy things like pastrami or roast beef for lunch. I made the decision out of sympathy to the poorly treated cattle as much to the toxicity of the meat. I must say that I feel better, I have lost weight, and I save the life of at least one steer per year.

We have fish three times a week (USA or Canadian only, preferably wild caught), organic free range chicken once or twice a week and pasta with organic sauce the rest of the time.

I eat nothing fried. I don't use salt, butter, or oil. (I have a buttered bagel in the morning, but I might give this up). I don't buy white bread. I don't buy anything with corn sweetener.

I love milk, but I drink only fat free, hormone free, organic milk. This costs only a few pennies more and I don't need the milk fat in my diet.

We have vegetables with every meal (except the pasta). I have a yam or occasionally a potato with the vegetables. Yams have lots of natural vitamins and are easy to digest. Potatoes have less in the way of vitamins, but make a meal taste better.

I have a glass or two of red wine with my evening meal.

I no longer have cookies, cake or pie for desert. If I need a late night snack, I eat a bowl of organic whole grain cereal.

I have lost a steady pound or two a month for the last six months. My cholesterol is low.

As far as supplements go, I am not a huge believer in vitamins. I take a multivitamin in the morning, but I am getting a good supply of vitamins from my meals and I expect most of the vitamin tablet winds up flushed down the drain.

I take Co-enzyme Q10 because I am on an anti-cholesterol drug and the Q10 offsets the muscle weakness that sometimes results. The cholesterol drugs lower Q10 so it is important to take Q10 to replace the depletion.

I take Omega-3 fish oil supplement. This is one supplement that everyone agrees helps in many ways, most especially in reducing coronary heart disease.

The most controversial thing that I do is take a full 325mg of enteric coated aspirin every morning. The benefits of aspirin go up with the dose. Aspirin thins the blood, lowers risk of stroke and heart attack, and reduces risk of colon cancer. It may delay or prevent arthritis and Alzheimer's. Doctors recommend a low dose of aspirin because aspirin's benefits are offset by the reduction of the ability of the blood to clot and may result in dangerous ulcers or bleeding. I will cut back it there is ever a problem, but for now, I don't have a problem with bleeding and I don't have an ulcer.

NASA is 50 today.

GOOGLE has a nice NASA banner today reminding us that NASA is 50.

Neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem to be interested in funding NASA anymore. I guess astronauts don't vote. That is too bad. America is in need of something to make it special again. Right now we are drowning in the economic muck created by gutless politicians.

NASA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MP3 - MP4 - MP5

e. Jim has been discussing buying a new MP3/video player and I have been thinking about this, too. It is a tough choice and I will probably wait until prices come down.

The choices are:

1) PDA - like a Dell Axim or a Palm.

2) iPod - the new ones do video.

3) iTunes - iPhone without the phone. It does everything, including wifi for Internet browsing.

4) Chinese MP5 player - very cheap and going to get cheaper.

 

I tried to get my Dell Axim x50v to be useful for anything, but it is a permanent boat anchor. For video  you will need at least 4 gigs of storage. You need at least a gig to store a long book on MP3. The AXIM has a megabytes and won't even play most videos.

The iPods can be had for about $100 in the lower memory configurations if you shop the refurbs at Apple.com's store. This is a the solution that works best, but is still pricey.

iTunes is a good choice, but I think they are going to be a round of price cuts yet on Apple products, so hold off until January.

The Chinese MP5 players look good, but there are scam artists. You have to be careful that you get all the memory that you pay for. They cost about $75 shipped from China with a touch screen. The MP5 is a misnomer. There are only MP3 or Mpeg-4 players. The MP5 means that it plays a much larger variety of formats. There aren't really MP5 files.

Here is the eBay Link to a 4 GB 3" touch screen MP5 player. It is from a Hong Kong shipper and I can't guarantee that you'll actually get it, but it does look tempting.

Leigh Brackett - The Long Tomorrow

I have been accused of not including women writers in my lists of favorites, but I always include Andre Norton and lately, Leigh Bracket.

Leigh Brackett, known as The Queen Of Outer Space, has written some great SF over the years. Her collaboration with Ray Bradbury, Lorelei of the Red Mist, is one of my favorite SF stories of the Golden Era.

Leigh Brackett might be better known as a principle screen writer on the classic movie The Big Sleep. She filled the pulps in the 40s and 50s with space opera and produced some very good stuff. She was definitely not a hack and produced well written stories with depth in spite of the lurid covers on the magazines.

I picked up an old Ballantine Books paperback edition of The Long Tomorrow to read on the bus. (The cover was not that interesting so I put up a cover for another story from a 1955 Planet Stories.) The writing is easy and clear. The characters are well rounded and compelling. The plot - well it is a 1950s post-apocalypse story. The "life after the bomb" stories were popular, yet done to death in the 1950s. We all worried about Russia dropping the bomb in the 1950s. I remember the weekly air raid drills where we all sat in the hall and put our heads between our knees - like we would have survived a nuclear attack. My uncle had a bomb shelter in his house stocked with dry food and a chemical toilet.

About half way through, I realized that I had read this before. I started to recognize plot points, but I did not remember how it comes out. I am enjoying this read. It has been long enough that this is really a first read. The plot is about a post-apocalyptic agrarian society. It is against the law to have towns with more than 200 buildings and 1,000 people. Technology has returned to a primitive state where an occasional steam engine is as complicated as it gets. Two boys find a radio that had been hidden by a traveling trader. They become obsessed with finding a mythical Bartorstown where freedom of thought and knowledge still exists and its secret denizens prepare for the day when technology will return.

There are adventures as the boys set out on their quest. I have read 190 pages of the 258 page paperback. I will finish it on the way home tonight. (I am averaging 2.5 books a week since I started taking the bus.) It is a good page-turner of a story and I would recommend it, in spite of its overused theme. Brackett is a good writer and this is one of her best books.

Drabbles

A Drabble is a story of exactly 100 words. I have read about this kind of thing, but I have enough trouble making an understandable story in 4,000 words, so I have never entered - until now.

It seems I will do anything to avoid work. The problem with 100 words is that you can do it in two or three minutes. Of course that's also a problem because 101 words or 99 words is just as easy to write. Getting exactly 100 words takes five times as long as the original writing.

I sent them two and I am deleting the link in my bookmarks so that I will not be tempted to send more.

THE 12TH SAM'S DOT DRABBLE CONTEST OPEN

The Twelfth Sam's Dot Drabble Contest is now underway - closes midnight July 31. Theme is ETs on FacePlace.

Election Polls Badge

Electoral-Vote.com has these neat badges for blogs. If you remember, 4 years ago I made several posts about Electoral-Vote.com and RealClearPolitics.com. I found that these two sites really helped in understanding what was going on in the election.

It looks like a landslide today, but this tightens up quite a bit by November. If the Democrats take the senate, house and white house, will there be changes? Probably not anything substantive, and that's the tragedy. It is good, however, to change the crooks in charge every few years.

Codex Sinaiticus

This is an interesting site. It is dedicated to the oldest version of the New Testament known to exist.

Christianity as an organized religion was put together around the year 360 and this bible dates from this period. The text is different from modern versions because the text was being revised and corrected considerably in this period. I am particularly interested in the Book of Mark and this version does not have the resurrection story that was added around this time. The book ends with the discovery of the empty tomb.

I have read where modern Christians tend to think the English translations of the Bible are the real Gospel and that God intended that the Bible should be read only in English so that ignorant people don't get confused.

The translations of this Greek version (some of which was translated from Aramaic and Hebrew into Greek) will be added to the site as they are available. The result will be different from modern Bibles by a long shot.

My opinion is that the book of Mark is not the word of God, but the word of Mark, who never met Jesus, but perhaps was the nephew of Peter. In any case all of the gospel is second or third hand stories recorded hundreds of years after the fact. The Codex Sinaiticus at least gives a clearer view of the text that had only been around for 200 years at the time it was transcribed and had not had as much time to be tweaked.

Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament.

Codex Sinaiticus

John Brunner - Catch a Falling Star

I used Brunner's Shockwave Rider as required reading in a course I taught in Artificial Intelligence. In 1975 Brunner was able to predict the WWW, if not in specific details, in attitude. The book describes a world wide interactive information network. He was the first person to describe a "worm" or self replicating computer program that is able become part of the network and change its behavior. 

15 to 20 years before writing Shockwave Rider, Brunner was producing a large number of books and short stories. He always was prolific and wrote sometimes four books a year. Many of these were short novels, about 60,000 words or less, that appeared in Ace Doubles. I collect Ace Doubles and I must have 20 Brunner titles.

Unfortunately, these are not always a good read. Brunner often writes in a very dry style, almost as if he is affecting an accent. His characters have little depth and the best that you can do is follow his complex plots and hope to understand motivations. The better books were written in the second half of his career, but many later novels were rewrites of his early works with extra material added with a new title.

I grabbed a book from my unread pile after I finished Louis L'Amour's The Man From the Broken Hills, a very typical, but forgettable book from L'Amour's Sackett series. The Man From the Broken Hills took only two days, three and a half 50 minute bus rides, to finish.

Catch a Falling Star is a rewrite of his earlier (1959) The Hundredth Millennium, which I might have read since the plot of Catch a Falling Star seems familiar. It is short, about 70,000 words, by today's standards. Brunner notes that The Hundredth Millennium was shorter still.

The story is about a man, 100,000 years in the future, who discovers that a star will destroy the Earth in about 288 years. He sets out to find out who can help him avoid this catastrophe, but since it will happen after they have died, no one cares. Brunner's characters wander through a strange world where people live with genetically engineered plants and animals that provide for their every need. There are History Trees that have the racial memories of men going back thousands of years. These trees have all of mankind's memories, but seduce those that enter them and when people come out they are obsessed with some period of time.

Brunner's amazing imagination drags us along from incident to incident, but the characters mostly just worry about the future and don't interact emotionally on any level. Their names are odd and hard to remember and I found myself wondering which character was speaking many times. They all talk and act pretty much the same.

I have about 25 pages to go so I do not yet know if the main character Creohan (or is it Chalyth?) finds a way to divert the star. I suspect that they will use the history tree to discover an artifact from the past or contact descendants of those that traveled to the stars. Perhaps they will just give up and the decadent cultures left on Earth will die a well deserved death.

As you see, I am not thrilled with the book. Brunner did so much better in his books Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. I read his Squares of the City in the late 1960s, which was a book based on a famous chess game. Each character corresponds to a piece in the game and every plot point reflects a move. It was fascinating as it had the game moves in the book and I could follow the plot on a chess board.

Catch a Falling Star is mostly a quick rewrite of a mediocre novel making it a longer mediocre novel. I was disappointed.

Boom

It's raining heavy this morning. I slipped on the wet terrazzo floor in the lobby of office building where I work. I hit hard. Nothing is broken, but boy am I sore. The longer I sit in this chair, the more my back hurts. It is going to be a long day.

I did not spill my coffee. Years of training in office arts has taught me that the coffee cup comes first. I held on to it and kept it upright the whole way down.

Blues/R&B for Barack Obama

Sam Waymon is providing the music for an Obama voter registration drive in Nyack at the Gazebo in Memorial Park. Sam is the brother of the Late Nina Simone and an avid Obama supporter.

I've played harmonica with Sam many times at the jams in Nyack and other places. I hope the weather holds out, he's a good guy and the music will be great.

Tuesday, August 5 at 6:30 PM
Memorial Park (Nyack, NY)
The Gazebo at Memorial Park

Speaking of good music, My brother Larry will at Casa Del Sol in Nyack this Saturday at 9:30pm. This is fun because the swing dancers come and tear the place up. It's free, so stop by. If you recognize me, I'll buy you a beer.

Search Craigslist with Google

I made a form to search all CraigsList.org locations with one click. This should be useful to someone.

Search Craigslist with Google

Tor.com

I signed up with Tor.com's community because I see many other SF people there. I used the handle JT30, which is a special kind of microphone. harmonica players know me as that JT30 guy.

I am still trying to figure out what to do with the Tor site, but I have been assured that it is a good thing.

Tor.com Keith's Profile - JT30

Chitika Ads Hijacked my Site

The link above is to a discussion forum that had similar problems to the ones I had with Chitika. The comments on my original posts from a Chitika rep claim that this was impossible, but I have found several instances in the last two weeks where Chitika ads were hijacking web pages and causing pop-ups - even porn.

I used to like Chitika and I haven't pulled it from one of my low yield websites, but I will not put it on my higher quality sites until I get some kind of guarantee that they will prevent this kind of behavior in the future.

From Chitika's own site:

Chitika is using a Right Media reseller to fill their CPM inventory. right Media's inventory is full of RON crap....spam ads, blinking OMG YOU WON ads, popups, malware....just crap. You're supposed to be better than this, chitika. Whoever made this decision, from the top down, is a fool.

Science Fiction Review from Antiquarian Weird Tales

Chris Perridas has been scanning the front page of old Science Fiction Review newsletters and posting them to his blog. This was a very good zine of reviews, news and gossip that was produced in the 1960s and many of the early issues were typed by hand and copied or printed offset. Erica produced a newsletter around the same time for Sweepstakes, using the same technology.

Chris only does the first page, which is intriguing, as there are some great articles. One by Andre Norton explains the development of plot and characters in some of her novels, including Witch World.

The January 1965 has a review of Davy, by Edgar Pangborn - one of my favorite books by one of my favorite writers. It has a review of Heinlein's collection The Menace from Earth.

It has a horrible review of Herbert Kastle's The Reassembled Man.

Now The Reassembled Man is not literature. It is a novel that reflects its time, and I read it recently for the first time. It has aged fairly well. I gave it to a friend who writes screenplays and suggested that it would make a great movie. He read it and did not see it. I thought about writing the screenplay myself. In any case it does not deserve the review that Robert Franson gave it.


Chris Perridas: Antiquarian Weird Tales

Chitika Premium problems

I turned off most of my Chitika ads today. Their new premium ads were the cause of the browser hijacks. They never did more than a dollar a day for me on about 8,000 exposures, but I considered this to be a problem with the fact that I placed them below the fold, near the bottom of a long pages.

What they did was resell their ad space to doubleclick and other advertisers. Along the way they were not very careful about who they were selling to, because the ads resulted in the execution of javascript that produced popups and in some cases page redirection to other websites.

Popups suck and I never want them on my page. Browser redirects are unacceptable. I opted out big time. I am now going through and removing Chitika code from websites. I don't need users calling me up about problems for a lousy dollar a day.

Tor.com

Tor.com has a new website. It is a nicely done CMS (Content Management System), likely Joomla or Drupal. I really like the way it was put together. It has everything you would need at an SF site, without obnoxious flash that would get in the way. I really like the Buck Rogers rocket that they use for a logo.

I generally don't like reading on a computer screen (I do it for a living and I don't like doing it for pleasure.) I will sign up and give a few stories a try. The bookmark is going in my "good morning" folder so when I click "Open All In Tabs" this will be there waiting for me.

I have experimented with CMS systems for use as webzines. They are difficult to modify, but very easy to use. Another Realm used a CMS, but did not keep up with the security patches and the site was hacked, bringing it down for months. E. Jim uses geeklog for his blog. I used geeklog and liked it. Here at work we use Joomla for the Intranet as it rates as having fewer security breaches over the years.

The main problem with CMS systems is that you have to hire a geek to modify and maintain them. It is not something the average webzine editor has time to do.

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Weblog, short fiction, art, and discussion

Harpamps Hacked

My site harpamps was hijacked. It seems to have come from one of my advertisers. Someone made some kind of malicious javascript that sends  browsers to another web site. I am the process of removing everything I can from the site.

Pompton Lakes Town Wide Garage Sale

It seems that I have been seeing a lot of New Jersey's Lakes lately. This is fine with me. I like lakes.

We went down to Pompton Lakes - about 30 miles down 287 from Nyack. There was no traffic today. The price of gas has hit $4 and like someone turned off a switch, the traffic stopped.

We went to at least 50 garage sales. It seemed that at least 25% of the homes were having a garage sale. There were lots of sales that we didn't even get to. Every block had two or three sales.

I bought some odd stuff like a USB hub and US government publication on ethanol from 1980. (I want to make a post just on this book).

Erica found a few frames and an antique black walnut mirror for $8.

Here are some pictures of Pompton Lake. It was hot and hazy.

Justine's Bird House

Justine sent a birdhouse from Martha's Vineyard. It's a Claire Murray design - hoity-toity.

I screwed a 1/2 inch steel pipe flange on the bottom with an 8" nipple. I used a 10 foot 3/4 inch electrical conduit as a post. The conduit is galvanized and should last 20 years.

 

This is the view from the back deck.

 

Astound Me

I complained to Amazon and worked out the glitch that had kept my CD in limbo. Here it is for sale. I received the sample by Fed Ex today. It is three stories that I recorded. I am afraid that my voice is a little flat and uninteresting. I have received a few nice reviews from listeners, though.

Save your money, unless you are very rich, then you can buy a dozen. I think I make about a buck on each one I sell. The CD probably costs Amazon about 50 cents. I am guessing that Amazon makes about 6$ on each sale after all the overheads are charged.

Astound Me

I just found the Astound Me MP3 Download on Amazon.

Jess Manafort and Stella Maeve Podcast

Stella, the only Movie Star that I know, is in this podcast.

Jess Manafort & Stella Maeve Podcast

More Merged Movies

Jed:

The Picture of Dorian Gray's Anatomy: a specific part of Dorian never ages....

Don Quixote Ugly: a knight walks into a bar...

The Executioner's Torch Song Trilogy: serial killer meets drag queen and has epiphany...ok, not really, he just kills him

The Sixth Sense and Sensibility: M. Night Shamalamadingdong's romantic comedy of a boy who sees dead people in 19th century England

---

Robert:

"Misery Love Company"
Bobby Baby meet his biggest date ever. Watch for Elaine Stritch in a cameo role. Scr: Stephen King Mus: Stephen Sondheim

"Das Glass Bottom Boot"
German submarine crew experience the tedium and terrors of boat touring in Florida. Feat. Doris Day, Arthur Godfrey. Dir: Wm. Peterson

"Little Big Man O' War"
Just after WWI, Jack Crabb finds himself riding a prize-winning race horse. Later he and the horse retire to a stud farm.

"The Road to Iraq"
Camels, oil, dictators, explosions. Featuring two songs by Dorothy Lamour.

"Annie Get Your Guns Of Navarone"
Annie Oakley takes down the fortress while firing behind her back using a mirror. Gregory Peck, David Niven, Ethel Merman.

"Harry Potter and The Magic Christian"
Harry, Ron, and Hermione search for Valdemort on a trans-Atlantic cruise ship. Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, Daniel Radcliffe

"Five Easy Mystic Pizzas"
Robert returns home to Gloucester, MA from the oils fields of Texas upon hearing his father took ill while working a double at the shop. Hold the chicken salad calzone.

"Memoirs of a Geisha Boy" The life a Geisha presented in flashbacks as she waits to start the telethon. Miyoshi Umecki, Jerry Lewis

Twitter / kpgraham

If you notice, there is a twitter this button now on each post. I am testing this. The bad thing is that it does a "tinyurl" on the url so it fits nice in a twitter line. Good for users, bad for SEO purposes.

I am not a big fan of twitter. I suspect that you already know enough about my life and would not want to know my thoughts and mood every few seconds. This microblog thing is not such a useful tool for me.

It would be, however, a good way to get traffic. I will make a page explaining how to add it to any web page next week. It will be more than one line long so I won't be using twitter.

Twitter / kpgraham

Twitter bookmarklet test

Excuse me while I use the blog to test a twitter bookmarklet.

This might be a twitter this button

Writing for an Extraterrestrial Audience

SPACE.com has a interesting article about writing for ET.

there is a critical difference from other creative writing classes. The intended audience for this class — if it exists at all — lives on a planet circling a distant star

SPACE.com -- Writing for an Extraterrestrial Audience

Jim C. Hines - I am the Very Model of a Modern SF Novelist

Jim C. Hines has created some very clever words for this Gilbert and Sullivan ditty. (Here's just 4 lines).

In fact, when I know what is meant by "grok" and "droid" and "FTL",
When I can tell at sight the sword Excalibur from Anduril,
When twists in stories I perceive by reading just one paragraph,
And when I know precisely how to pen a clever epigraph,

I am the Very Model of a Modern SF Novelist

Nasa Jobs

I still want to take some courses at the Swinburn Astronomy Online Masters Program. If I did, I might be able to get a NASA tech job like this one:

Space Scientist, AST, Planetary Studies
The Solar System Exploration Division is seeking an expert to study Icy Moons Tectonics and Evolution (including, but not limited to, orbital-rotational dynamics, stress histories, interior structure and evolution, surface processes, and thermal evolution).

I could do this - really!

I was on the www.usajobs.gov site and actually did apply for a few NASA jobs. I'd take a cut and pay to work for NASA. Wouldn't it be cool to say "I work for NASA" when some bozo asks you what you do for a living? Justine should apply for the This one.

Weebly

If you are looking for a way to create a blog you might consider Weebly.com.

I got to this quite by accident. I had a test twitter account and someone "followed" me on twitter. After a couple of clicks I wound up the person's Blog at weebly. I signed up to test it out and I was impressed.

The site is very much on the theme of Office Live or Google Pages, but easier to use. It has a built in Blog that looks similar to Wordpress, but is also much easier to use than Blogger, Wordpress or Livejournal. It appears that it lets you add your own custom html, so you can add all your favorite widgets to it.

I'll try to cusomize the pages a little and if it is successful, I might even release the page, although I have too many blogs now.

One interesting thing about this person who twitted me, is that he is living in Rockland County. Unfortunately he goes to the Missionary College, so I expect he wouldn't want to play poker, not even our brand of play for a nickel games that have more in common with chess, or battleship, or chutes and ladders than high stakes gambling. Growing up, some of my best friends' parents were at the missionary college, but I suspect that I was always a bad influence on them.

Swing State - Ohio

My Dad always said that 90% of the population votes pretty much at random and manages to cancel themselves out. This well done analysis points to partisan votes canceling each other out and the smaller number of swing votes making the actual decision.

It makes sense, since the Republicans that I know will not vote otherwise and the same for the Democrats. The vote will be determined by those who actually vote without the passion of a partisanship. This is a gentle shift with only a small number of people making the difference.

The red and blue graphs of Ohio show the subtlety of the vote. With a 1 or 2% shift, the whole election can change.

My Dad was right, though. Most votes cancel each other out.

It is encouraging that my Mom has become one of the swing voters. She and her friends, she told me, had never voted for a Democrat in their whole lives. My mother whispered to me, that in the last election she just could not vote for the A-S-S Bush who was killing all of those nice boys by sending them to Iraq. She had to spell it because my Mom hardly ever uses a bad word.


RealClearPolitics Swing State Ohio Review

Craigslist Telecommute Writing Jobs

J quit his job, Johnny B. is out of work and I am always looking for something to do that is not work related.

I made this new automatic page to capture all new the "Telecommute OK" writing jobs on Craigslist without having to search each of the separate cities.

As of this writing I am having a little trouble with the system (it keeps ignoring the emails from google), but I put the underlying link on the page. I think I know what the problem is, and I will have this fixed in another half hour or so. Then I will just have to wait for Google to send out its alerts. In the future the page will only show the fresh items.

I am going to make a programming one for me, and a guitar for sale one for Larry.

Craigslist Telecommute Writing Jobs

Merged Movies

Polly sent me this with a demand that I get to work. It is basically creating a punny title by merging two movies together. The original was books, but movies are more fun.

Jim had the first one (Jim's favorite movie is The Third Man):

"The Third Manchurian Candidate" - A poor, drunken writer in post-war
Austria has been brainwashed to assassinate a noisy zither musician.

John came up with these:

"Woman in the Rear Window" -- A wheelchair-bound invalid in an apartment becomes obsessed with a wide-bottomed painter from across the courtyard.

"His Girl Friday the Thirteenth" - Pandemonium ensues when a serial killer begins slaughtering cub reporters in a city newsroom.

"A Porn Star is Born" -- The rags to riches tale of a man with a very large penis and a very small brain.

"A Room With a View to a Kill" -- James Bond hunts down a band of effete Edwardian Britishers hell-bent on picnics and lawn parties.

I came up with some Sci-Fi ones

"The Loneliness of a Long Distance Blade Runner" A rebellious youth, sentenced to a boy's reformatory for robbing a bakery, finds himself questioning who he is when evidence starts to indicate he could be a running replicant.

"A Star Wars is Born" A young Jedi Knight comes to Hollywood with dreams of the Dark Side, but achieves them only with the help of an alcoholic Yoda whose best days are behind him.

"2001, a Space Odyssey File" An freelance journalist Peter Miller finds a mysterious artifact buried on the moon and, with the intelligent computer HAL, finds himself involved with the powerful organization of former SS members, called ODYSSEY, as well as with the Israeli secret service.

While walking around at lunch I thought of:

"The Three Horse Feathers" A man is given feathers of cowardice by three brothers. Hijinx ensue.

OK readers, now yours!

---

Polly just sent me another one from John Prusinski:

How about "For Whom the Belle de Jour" - An American caught up in the Spanish Civil War falls for a kinky Catherine Deneuve. (and who wouldn't?)

and another one from her brother:

"For Whom the Bell Jar" where an American caught up in the Spanish Civil War falls for a manic-depressive.

---

Oh no! more from Anthony Corman

How Green Was My Valley of the Dolls: Huw Morgan leaves the Welsh mining village of his birth for a life of extramarital sex and barbiturate addiction in Hollywood.

My Naked Lunch with Murray: nuff said.

The Call of the Wild Bunch: Buck the dog joins a motorcycle gang.

Lord of the Ring Flies: Frodo takes a plane to Dallas-Fort Worth

Never Let Me Go Tell It on the Mountain: because once I get started...

The Native Son Also Rises: He has a glassel tea, maybe a bialy.

The Invisible Man Who Loved Children: Oy

Gulliver's Travels with Charlie: a naif and his dog RV their way through Lilliput, predictably crushing half its population.

On the Revolutionary Road: Hipster gets married and tries to settle in suburban Connecticut, only to get so drug that he flips his lid, daddy-o.

All the Pretty Horses' Mouths: [Oh the sick possibilities here. I'd best stop.]

---

and here's Jimmy!
Late but undaunted:

"The Sweet Smell of Sweetback's Badass" A New York press agent gets the scoop on a new black guy in town who's had enough of "the Man."

"A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead" Dead British rockers rise from the grave and send the girls screaming in the opposite direction.

"The Godzillafather" Radioactivity turns a mafia don into an indestructible force tamed only by turf wars and tiny singing girls.

"Goodfellas Will Hunting" Some New York mobsters take time out from their wacking to convince a troubled Boston student that "it's not his fault."

"Taxi Driving Miss Daisy" Travis Bickle leaves New York's mean streets for the more genteel horrors of the South and introduces Miss Daisy to her first porn movie.

"Apocalypse Never on Sunday" A big-hearted Greek hooker travels to Vietnam and tries to cure Colonel Kurtz of his "horror."

"Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice & Jules & Jim" A couple of french guys convince two American couples that they should add some jump cuts to their relationships.

---

and now Johnny B has a few more.

"The Omega Man of la Mancha" -- The sole surivivor of a nuclear holocaust keeps the mutant zombies at bay with amusing tales of a would-be knight errant.

"For Whom the Bell Jars" -- A disturbed young poetess is assailed with the delusion that the Spanish Civil War is taking place inside her head.

"The Good, the Bad, and the Coyote Ugly" -- Oh, enough of this already. . .

E85 Ethanol Conversion Digest

I made another automatic digest page about e85 Ethanol Conversion. After reading about it, my truck might not be a good subject for conversion. I can make it work, but the engine might perform well and would get lower mileage, even with the conversion kit. It would also suffer from corrosion issues since the gas tank might not take to the ethanol.

I found that many, many cars can run just fine on E85. A good percentage of cars on the road are built to run ethanol with corrosion resistant tanks, larger fuel injector jets and a sensor that can tell the fuel type. Strangely enough, my brother has a Mercury Sable that can run E85 without a problem. I will check the VIN number. If it has the number 2 in the eighth position on a Sable or Taurus, it will work. My truck has a two, but that doesn't mean anything. It has to have a V for my truck. It should say on the door label that it can take E85.

The problem now is that E85 is not readily available. There are two stations nearby that have it. I will talk to Larry and maybe even take a video of the adventure.

Check out if you have a a Flex Fuel Vehicle.

I think you might be careful about the conversion kits. I keep reading that some of them are scams. It is better to get a newer car that is built to be E85 compatible.

E85 Ethanol Conversion Digest

E85 Ethanol in Rockland County

I've been researching converting the truck to flex fuel. It turns out that the engine only needs a little computer programming to run gas or e85 Ethanol or any combination. The computer is capable of detecting the alcohol and adjusting the engine so it works. The engine computer plug-in costs around $400.

There is a station in Spring Valley, about 3 miles from my house, that sells E85. As far as I can tell it is about $1 or $2 cheaper than gas. If I use 10 gallons a week that's at least a $10 savings. So it pays for itself in less than a year.

I would like to try this, but $400 is too much for just an experiment. There is supposed to be an e85 pump in West Nyack and they are popping up all over the place, so availability is not the issue that it once was.

Here is the cheesy video that that Gas Station put on YouTube.

Christopher Morley - Human Being

The stories on my iPod were all screwed up. I tried to put the last Honor Harrington book on it, but it was scrambled. Although the order of the chapters seemed to be totally random, I was enjoying the book. It turns out Honor is pregnant, has a kid goes into battle and then is pregnant again with the same child. Finally, I stopped listening as I did not want to ruin the book for when I finally figured out how to straighten it out. I used a program called Markable, which often gets confused when it merges all the MP3 files into 1 hour sections.

I had to resort to reading!

I snatched a book from the top of a pile as I left for work. It is Human Being by Christopher Marley. I picked it up at a flea market last year for a quarter. I have enjoyed rereading Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop many times. These books are available on Project Gutenberg and are in any good library. They are two of the best books that you can every read if you love books and reading. They were written for those of us who read for pleasure. Again, if you haven't read them, run to the library and get a copy of each. You will not regret it.

Human Being was published in 1932 as opposed to Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, which were published in 1917 and 1919. Wikipedia does not know about Human Being at all and I can't find any discussion of it on the web.

The book is about a man who undergoes a kind of midlife crisis and decides to write the biography of a man who he had met just once and then died. This is not only the biography of Richard Roe but a biography of the Biographer, writes Morley.

Morley is a remarkably easy to read writer. The words flow in a kind, pleasant and thoroughly enjoyable stream. Every sentence is designed to make you smile. It is probably too light weight for these heavy times, but I think down deep there is some good solid bedrock.

Some random quotes:

Lucille Roe and her sister Hazel (Mrs. Herman Schmaltz) were agreed that is was inconsiderate of Richard to die on a ferryboat; and going towards Hoboken, too, from which she and Hazel had escaped many years ago.

Once he heard a speech in Congress, from the Visitors' Gallery - some deplorable rhodomontade with a ludicrous Star-Spangled peroration. He was moved; he tingled and applauded. But what else would you have him do?

A Pekinese is only a very small micturating mandarin on four legs, subject to numerous snobbish fallacies.

Lucile did not like Richard to stay out alone very long because in some obscure way she feared he might be thinking. This was wise of her, for she observed as he grew older that thinking was his chief danger.

So you get the idea. It is clever and witty and there is some nice truth to be had from each sentence. If you miss a sentence now and then because the bus lurches, you can pick it up the next time you read, but you don't have to worry about missing a key point in the plot.

Giving up on CreateSpace

I blogged about createspace.com last month. It is Amazon's POD house. Using CreateSpace gets you on Amazon with an ISBN and it is supposed to be free.

I tried creating a title and it just stopped at one of the steps and didn't go any further. I am not sure what I am doing wrong. There also seems to be no way to delete a project with them.

I'll may come back to this, but for now, I am frustrated and have given up.

Has anyone else tried createspace? Did you go all the way through and get listed on Amazon? Did you have to buy a proof copy?

Jim Baens Universe

Jim Baen's Universe is closing to subs August 1.

The reason that I mention this is that it would be a good idea to submit a story to them now.

They will take any story that has not been published in a SFWA "Pro" zine:

We do not care if your story has been "published" somewhere else -- fanzine, personal web site, whatever -- unless you turned over the rights to it. So long as you retain the rights and it's an original piece of writing, you can submit it unless it's been previously published in one of SFWA's established professional publications.

I am going through my stories and I want to pick a good one, previously published, that might get serious consideration. 25¢ a word can not be sneezed at. I know a few writers read this blog. Get your best story out to them, even if it has been published before in a non-pro zine.

Submit your story via the slush topic in Baen's Bar. This is more complicated than it seems, so read the instructions carefully.

But wait there's more!

The Baen's Bar Universe Slush will remain open after August 1, so it means that they will look in the slush and buy from time to time, possibly less often, though.

You can submit as often as you like, so get all of your old stories in there. I would suggest that you stagger them a week or so, to avoid anyone saying "Oh no! Not another story from that joker!"

I had a story bumped up to Flint, the editor, the one and only time that I submitted to Baen. It is tough to get asked for a rewrite from one of the highest paying SF editors, and then still get a reject. They are looking for Hard SF, Military SF, and Action SF. E. Jim, who reads this blog, writes the type of stuff Baen seems to publish, as far as I can tell from the story he once sent me.

Jim Baen's Universe

Vistas and Ice Cream

Erica and I set off from rte. 15 to rte. 94, which took us north and then east on our way home.

On the way home I took some pictures of a view of the Wawayonda (neat name) valley.

Erica pointed out that the barn I was standing next to had lightening rods on the roof, right out of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Then, on the way towards Warwick and rte. 17a, we stopped for Ice cream. This part of north Jersey is very rural and there are lots of Dairies. Sometimes you can smell a dairy a half a mile away.

The Ice Cream store shop was out in the middle of nowhere and was still crowded. I am used to the thin anemic ice cream that you get at grocery stores. This was incredibly rich and made from local fresh cream.

This was the view of the Warwick valley from the back yard of the ice cream store.

Lakes

After the Flea Market, I went north on route 15 to Mohawk Lake, Highland Lake and then Greenwood Lake. I've blogged some nice pictures at Mohawk Lake in older posts. Here are the pics from Highland Lake.

Highland lake is controlled by a corporation and you have to join the owner's society and pay for the maintenance of the lake.

This new Nikon camera often does not take a picture, even though you think it is working.

Erica and I stopped by an Open House for a small house on the water. These are the pictures from the back yard, but the interior pictures did not come out. I got no pictures of the house at all except for a weird one of the foundation.

Dover Flea Market

We drove down about 50 miles to Dover, NJ because they were having a town wide garage sale at their flea market. It was not that good. I guess most people at Dover had a lot of junk, but nothing exciting for me.

There was a cool chewing tobacco ad painted on one of the Dover buildings. I wonder how this survived the ban on tobacco advertising.

We had coffee from a little luncheonette that had cinnamon and chicory in it. Very good. I bought gas for $3.89 a gallon, probably the last gas under $4 that I will buy for a while.

Cleaning out the Camera

I've got about 5 blog posts worth of stuff here so let's start with a picture of a very hot Max on the glider on the deck.

I took some pictures of the Blueberry Bushes. These will mostly be eaten by birds before I can get at them, though.

Last weekend we went up to Haverstraw for the Farmer's market. It was disappointing as there were only three stands. I bought some Blue Potatoes, which I love.

I took some pictures from the Ferry dock. $10 to go to wall street from Haverstraw (30 miles). This is the way to go if I get another job in the big city.

The hill there is Hi Tor, famous from a play by Maxwell Anderson. I worked at Hogan's Diner one summer with Maxwell Anderson's grandson. He was amazed that I had actually read some of his grandfather's plays.

The mountains on the Hudson river have cool names, although they are hardly mountains, just hills. The names, starting at Nyack going north are Hook, Tor, Bear and The Storm King.

I wanted to show how hard it is to type on the Bus. No room for my knees and no room to put my elbows when I type. Last week I finished my second week of bussing. On Thursday the bus driver got lost on the way home and it took an hour and a half. On Tuesday I got involved with a program, missed my bus and didn't get home until 6:30pm.

Here are some bus pictures of the TZ bridge.

Southern Fried Weirdness

My story, Crayfish, I hate Crayfish! is online at Southern Fried Weirdness | Southern Speculations.

Please click, read, and enjoy.

John W. Campbell, Jr.

JWC died on this day 37 years ago. He was only 63. He was an intelligent man. He graduated from Duke, my Dad's Alma Mata. Unfortunately, 37 years ago, intelligent men were heavy smokers, lived sedentary lives, ate lot's of red meat and drank their whiskey neat, so they died relatively young of heart attacks.

I think JWC's influence in SF was pretty much over by the time he died. Heinlein wouldn't submit to Analog Magazine and the better writers had moved to Galaxy, IF, and F&SF. Campbell had rejected two of Heinlein's Hugo award winning stories (with long letters explaining what was wrong with them).

I wonder how SF would be different today if John had quite smoking, taken to long walks and started eating more fish?

In spite of all of the man's personal failings, he is still a shining figure in the history of Science Fiction. He will always be a personal hero of mine.

Genetic Engineering Digest

I've added another blog-like digest generated from Google alerts. This one is for genetic engineering. The first page has at least three good Science Fiction story ideas.

Any ideas for another digest? I was going to do String Theory and maybe some astronomy based ones.

I have it working pretty well. I found that I had to turn off the spam filter because the Google alerts kept getting caught in the spam.

I am thinking of also programming the del.icio.us api to provide similar links that I can format into a blog.

Genetic Engineering Digest

"Genetic Engineering Digest is an extract from leading news sources and blogs, updated daily."

Blog This Page

I made a Squidoo lens that helps your to add the Blogger.com and LiveJournal.com bloggers blog about your page. I used the code to blog this.

Blog This Page

Mushroom Men

I received this today. I know nothing about Mushroom men and I doubt if I can come up with anything. Maybe you have an idea that will express well in an odd gamer world.

SPACE SQUID, in association with GamecockMedia.com and RevolutionSF.com, announces the Mushroom Men fiction contest, a free writing contest! First prize is a free Wii game console and a copy of the new Wii videogame Mushroom Men!
Other prizes include Les Claypool Mushroom Men rock posters, Mushroom Men baseball caps, trading cards with sweepstakes codes, Mushroom Men squeezy toys, and copies of Mushroom Men for the Wii and for the Nintendo DS. Runner-up stories will appear on the fiction page of RevolutionSF.com and in a special supplementary issue that will be seen by hundreds of people at gaming events like the Penny Arcade Expo.
The first-prize story will appear in the supplementary issue, RevolutionSF.com, Space Squid issue #6, and may appear as promotional material for the game elsewhere.
Contest Details:
-Deadline August 1st, 2008
-Write a story that incorporates the universe of the Mushroom Men console game, published by Gamecock Media. Entrants should read the game background information at SpaceSquid.com or MushroomMen.com before submitting their entries.
-Free writing contest entries should be between 500 and 1500 words.
-Submit entries to squishy@spacesquid.com as an attached RTF file. Please put "Free Writing Contest: YOUR STORY TITLE" in the subject line.
-Submissions will be judged according to
a.) How well they adhere to the game universe, and
b.) How much they rock.
-First prize is a free Wii game console, the Mushroom Men videogame, and publication in Space Squid.
-Runners up prizes TBA and publication in RevolutionSF.com.
-This is a free writing contest; multiple entries encouraged.
Additional information and updates at:
http://www.spacesquid.com/free_writing_contests.htm
http://www.revolutionsf.com/bb/weblog.php?w=5&category=Space%20Squid

Google Lively

Google announced its Virtually Reality Web Site. It is slow, like second life, easier to use, but geared towards children. I was hoping that they would have a nice API so I could create some content. No content yet, though and the only avatar that you can make is about 14 years old. (I was disappointed that they didn't have over-weight, out-of-shape old guys as an option.)

Here's my blues harp room. I have Carlos playing on the jumbotron and my Lava Lamp playing on a wall TV.

Go to www.lively.com to get the software - it's a browser plug-in.

The Rest of Justine's Vacation Pics

Justine sent me the last bunch of images that she took on her Martha's Vineyard vacation.

The Clark House is there because Erica and Justine's last name is(was) Clark. The Black Dog tee shirts are there, because they are Martha's Vineyard's second most popular export, the first being cranberries. The Nude beach sticker is there, I assume, because Justine broke down and went skinny-dipping at Gay Head.

 

I like the fact that I can just drag the image files into Windows Live Writer and, Bob's-your-uncle, there they are on your blog post. I had a friend from England who used colorful phrases like Bob's-your-uncle. He would sometimes add at the end of a long explanation, "As the actress said to the bishop", which I think meant the same as "That's what she said", but I think he just said it to shake up my train of thought.

The Light Horse by Edward Cranswick

Ed Cranswick was a buddy of mine in High School. We hung out in the physics lab at Nyack High School and got into trouble. We, along with Mike Sivy (now a semi-famous stock market writer), built a computer out of army surplus relays. We made a jacob's ladder from a high voltage transformer, and we set the physics lab on fire on parent teacher's night.

Ed is one of the 10 or so really smart people that I have met and liked. He was originally from Australia and was so fed up when Bush was elected that he left the US and returned to the land down under. Ed's father was from England and his mother was from Australia and he spoke with an English accent.

Ed was a human shield in Iraq and as time goes on he seems less and less crazy and more and more like he was the only one I know who stood up to his convictions.

He has a cool piece in an anti-war web site. The article is part history, part biography, part short story and part an indictment of the war. It is about the British battle of at Beersheba, Palestine which was fought to provide the British with Oil, if Ed is right.

From what I read, the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, of which the battles at Beersheba were part, had more to do with keeping the Suez Canal open by fighting the Ottoman Empire than controlling oil fields. My Dad always claimed that WW I had a lot to do with oil from the start and that even though most of the fighting was in France, the goal was to control the Mideast. Ed's claim that his grandfather died Fighting Muslims for Oil for the British Empire, is, perhaps, not entirely true, in that keeping Europe from being conquered by the Germans played a part in the war.

The_Light_Horse_by_Edward_Cranswick

A quick little Ed Cranswick story: There was a large relief map of Africa in one of the classrooms. I think this was a creative writing class. While Ed was standing in the front of the class reading, the map fell off the wall and landed on him. He struggled to get out from under it and lifted it back in place. After it was rehung on the wall, he turned to the class, and in his perfect English accent he deadpanned: "Ah, the white man's burden."

Jupiter Story

I have been thinking a bit on the possibility of human life surviving on Jupiter. The gravity at the top of the cloud layer is about 2.5g, which is tolerable by humans to a certain degree and a genetically engineered human could enjoy this. Balloons or dirigibles could cruise the clouds, easily and gliders could go from habitat to habitat. The atmosphere is mostly hydrogen, with some helium. The balloons would have to be "hot air" balloons, actually filled with hydrogen that has been warmed to make it less dense than the atmosphere. There are traces of Ammonia, Methane and other hydrocarbons along with sulfur compounds that cause the color of Jupiter. The ammonia and methane could be farmed or collected to provide fuel for the colony. Oxygen is available in small quantities as CO2 or water vapor.

Life could be dangerous. The dirigibles, being at the top of the atmosphere, would be vulnerable to meteorites and lightning. The gravity would be dangerous in that anything dropped would fall fast - 2 and a half times faster than on earth. A glider in a spin would have less time to recover control. The atmosphere would be cold and poisonous.

The atmospheric winds are potentially very strong, but from what data I could find, the prevailing winds are usually mild enough, and strong storms are the exception, although in some latitudes they are more common. There are bands of strong winds similar to the jet stream.

Interesting ideas might include interaction with the indigenous life forms. I envision the cloud dwelling Jovians as gas filled balloons like huge Jellyfish and Manta Ray like gliders.

I have tried to Google dirigibles on Jupiter, but can't find anything. I am sure that this can't be a new idea, but I haven't read anything on it. An I can't find any direct references in Google. The Russians proposed dropping balloons into Jupiter to measure the atmosphere.

I have started writing a few scenes, but I need a good conflict.

Panasonic "Let's Note" is Back

Last Winter, the little Panasonic ToughBook "Let's Note" that Justine brought back from Hong Kong, rolled over and played dead. I took it apart (like a puzzle box - about 30 screws) and I pulled the hard drive. I was able to pull lots of information off of it and then format the drive, but I was never able to get the little ToughBook to work.

Yesterday afternoon, it was raining and I didn't fell like doing anything ambitious, so I thought that I'd try one more time before I put it up for sale on eBay for parts. I put it on the dining room table and operated on it for an hour.

It now works!

It is a nice little machine, but the drivers are not to be found anywhere. Panasonic acts like this version of the ToughBook (called Let's Note in Hong Kong) does not exist. I can not find the drivers for it.

I have drivers for the video, the wireless and the touchpad because they are made by other manufacturers and I got their drivers, but the Ricoh card reader seems to be Panasonic specific and I can't get the Sound to work. The drivers at Panasonic are all keyed to a bios model number and don't load if you use the wrong one.

It is good for the bus, though because it is very light and small. The keyboard is cramped and I can't touch type on it because the punctuation, delete and backspace are all in the wrong places. I might get used to it, though - I was pretty good at it last Winter when it died.

Tomorrow morning I will use it to try to write a "Stranded" flash for AR. I have a few ideas so I will "blue sky" them into a document and then on the way back, look and see if any of them have wings. So far, my ideas have been bland. I need a conflict that can resolve in under 1000 words. I don't like flash that are like extended jokes. I don't like flash where the resolution is to reveal a hidden fact: e.g. the narrator is dead or is an alien or is in a VR game. A flash with a punch line sucks. I want to make it a real story.

4th of July Quote

I am a big John W. Campbell, Jr. Fan. As a person, he seems to have been a jerk, but as an editor, he created modern science fiction. As a writer, he was mostly readable. He's  known mostly for writing Who Goes There?, which has been made into a movie called The Thing, twice.

History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just screams, "Why don't you listen to me?" and lets fly with a big stick. - John W. Campbell, Jr.

Another Realm Contests

When I decided to start writing again, I got into it gently by entering the Another Realm Flash Fiction contests. They are fun, there is plenty of positive feedback, and the AR community is very nice. This is a very entertaining thing, so please enter.

Another Realm was badly hacked more than once and the webmaster started a job that took up most of his time, so it's been three years since they've had a contest. Please consider getting 1000 words down and sending it in.

The topic is "Stranded" for the next two months. I don't think you win anything except bragging rights. I am pondering the topic and I'll see if I can come up with a story. The nice thing about flash is that you can knock one off in an hour or so, send it off and it gets published. You don't have to spend much effort or worry time. Readers will, however, not hesitate to criticize your spelling and grammar, so check it over once or twice before submitting.

The guidelines are not easy to find on the site. Here is a cut and paste from their FAQ:

How do I submit a Contest Story?

Contests:

• A 1000 word limit.
  
• Please send in an e-mail in "plain text" format.
  
• Do not center titles.
  
• For italics, ****words you wish italicized***.
  
• Please include a word count.
  
• One entry per author, per contest.
  
• Clearly state this is a "Contest Entry" in the subject line of the email.
  
• Submissions are closed two weeks before the contest's end.
  (This is done so I can catch up with the entries)
  
• Please include your name, both real and/or as you wish it published.
  
• Your address, both email and physical, so we know how to contact you.
  
• Anotherealm accepts no attachments --no matter the type-- for fear of viruses.
  Set your stories to PLAIN TEXT and PASTE them in an e-mail for submission
  
• Anotherealm no longer accepts ANY hardcopy submissions.
  
• Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror only please.
  
• Copyright reverts to the author after publication.

Flash Fiction and Contest Stories (Up to 1,000 words) are handled by Webbie who can't spell, edit a sentence or even dance well. So, use a spell checker and give it a bit of polish, eh? Please send electronic submissions only, to flash.fiction@anotherealm.com. Questions about flash fiction or the contests can be sent to the webmaster.

Another Realm Contests

CraigsList Email Notifications

Wouldn't it be nice if you could receive a little email message when that collectible widget is up for sale on CraigsList.org. Unlike eBay, there is no built in little saved search in CraigsList. You have to check every day and you can miss a day or just get tired of looking and finding nothing.

There is however a free, easy and uncomplicated way to receive notifications when something appears on CraigsList.org.

Here's how you do it.

First, you need to search Google for the item. Google, it turns out, is very interested in CraigsList and checks it frequently. In my example I am looking for "vacuum tubes", those old glass electronic instruments that used to power every radio and TV. I collect certain kinds of vacuum tubes and equipment that uses them.

Here is a typical Google search:

"vacuum tube"

As you can see, I put quotation marks around the search because I don't want to find pages that have words vacuum and tube randomly scattered around the page. I need pages that have the exact phrase.

I can now refine that by saying that I want to search only the Boston CraigsList. The address of the Boston CraigsList is boston.craigslist.org. I can tell Google to search only the Boston CraigsList by entering:

"vacuum tube" site:boston.craigslist.org

This search will show me all the things on the Boston CraigsList with the phrase "vacuum tube" in it. As I write this I find 27 items, but most are a week or more old.

You, of course, might not live near Boston, so you would use the correct CraigsList. Go to CraigsList.org, click on the city nearest you and see what the site address is show in the browser address area. You might see Alaska.craigslist.org or newyork.cragislist.org or delhi.craigslist.co.in.

After checking that you typed everything right and you do indeed find things at craigslist, it is time to use Google email alerts.

Use the mouse to highlight the search phrase you typed in and copy it. Use your browser to go to www.google.com/alerts.

There is a dialog box that asks for search items, type, how often and your email address.

Put the search phrase (including the site: information) into the search items box.

Select  "Web" from the type drop down, and make select "Daily" from the how often drop down. Next put your email into the email box and press select alert.

If you are not using a Gmail account, you must confirm your email address. Google will send you an email and you have to click on the link in it to confirm. Also, if you are not using a Gmail account, you are limited to 10 alerts. I suggest getting a Gmail account. I like the service and it lets you control all of your alerts from one screen.

Once a day you will receive a nice little notification about your CraigsList search if Google finds anything. If Google hasn't found anything, you won't get any notification. Also you won't receive more than 10 listings a day in the email.

I find that my searches usually arrive in a bunch in the morning, but sometimes they don't arrive until well into the afternoon. They do come, however, and are usually not long after the listing appears.

First Week Tappan Zee Express Summary

I found that I can stand it on the bus. Most trips are only 40 minutes, even in bad traffic. I don't do much better with the truck.

I discovered that the seats or so cramped and that the bus bounces around so much that it is nearly impossible to type on the computer. I keep bringing it, though, in case the bridge backs up and we are not moving for a long period of time.

Today, the day be for the long Fourth of July Weekend, I discovered one very bad thing about the commute. My boss usually lets us out an hour early before a holiday. My bus normally leaves at 4:30. The next earlier bus leaves at 3:08. He came to my cubicle at 3:15 and told be I could go home. I am stuck here until 4:30, no matter what.

Running your car on wine

Prince Charles made headlines this week when it transpired that his Aston Martin DB5 sports car has been converted to run on wine and cheese – or at least bio-ethanol distilled from locally-produced wine and then improved with alcohol extracted from fermented whey, a bi-product of cheese making.

I discovered this while debugging my BioFuel digest automatic blog. Next I am going to make one for cute cat pictures.

Running your car on wine

Jackson Pollock's hi-fi

Jackson Pollock's Speaker-in-a-closet was speckled with paint like one of his paintings. He used a nice loud Bogen DB-20 as his amplifier.

I have a Bogen db-20 (garage sale find). I have only fired it up once, and it sounded great. When I get my house on the Maine coast, I'll find a good spot for it with one of my Dad's turntables. I might even speckle the speaker cabinet like Jackson Pollock.

"Pollock loved to play his hi-fi really loud, especially when Krasner was out of the house. Some things never change."

MobyGames - Developer BIO

A while ago I reverse engineered some old Adventure text games and rewrote them using JavaScript so that would run off of web pages. I haven't thought about these games for several years.

I just found out that as a result of my writing these programs, I am now listed at MobyGames as a game developer. Over the years I have written many text based games in basic, java, PHP and even COBOL. Writing a text adventure is like writing a short story, but I never thought to call myself a Game Developer.

I am almost tempted to put this on my resume.

MobyGames - Keith P. Graham

On the Bus - Day 3

I brought the little computer with me. It has a 600Mhz mobile processor that makes it very slow to boot up. I got it going and the battery lasted the whole 40 minutes of the trip and the display claimed that it had an hour and a half to spare. I did not however have any word processor installed, so there was not much accomplished except to do some configuration.

The bus seats are too close together and I was so cramped that I could not get in a comfortable position to type. I will copy Office XP to a USB drive and do the MS Word install on the way home. I am going to follow the wikihow.com article on How to Dramatically Speed up Windows XP. I am also looking to see if I can bump up the memory on the laptop to one or two gigs, which should speed up everything. Older memory is much more expensive than new memory, however.

I will also copy my work-in-progress folder to a USB drive and maybe actually write a thousand words on each trip.

Justine's Pictures of Gingerbread Houses on Martha's Vineyard

Justine sent me more pictures from Martha's Vineyard.

There are different kinds of houses on Martha's Vineyard. The older or classic style of the island homes is the Salt Box, which is a simple cedar shingle covered structure, typically with a shed roof to the north side and 1-1/2 stories facing the south. These are designed for efficient heating and resistance to the storms that cross the island.

The island's whaling industry collapsed towards the end of the 19th century and was replaced with the summer colonies that are still present today. The Victorian style houses date from middle of the 19th century to the around 1900. There are also Bungalow style houses from the turn of the century through the middle of the 20th century.

The "painted lady" style of decorative painting is actually not historically correct for this region. It is recently borrowed from the San Francisco fashion of decorating the ornamentation of the Victorian houses with bright colors. A real east coast Victorian house was never pink, orange or lavender until recently.

You will notice that there is a stiff breeze blowing in all of the photographs below that causes all the trees and houses to list badly. It is as I have always said, Justine is "a bubble off plumb". 

Ward's father-in-law

My youngest Brother, Ward, lives and works up in Rochester, NY. His father-in-law lives on an historic piece of land and has found many treasures with his metal detector and in local lakes.

The local paper had a nice right-up on him. That's Ward's Father-in-Law, Eugene R. Frost, in the picture.

Buried treasure offers history lessons in Schuyler | stargazette.com

TZ Express - Day 2

Here's the cost breakdown for crossing the bridge in the truck.

1) The truck get's 16 miles to the gallon. It is 15 miles (a little less) each way. Gas costs a minimum of $4 per gallon. That's $7.50 per day. (Gas is supposed to hit $5 this weekend and maybe $7 or $8 before the end of the summer.)

2) Parking costs $90 per month. I like to figure I work 20 days per month so that is about $4.50 per day to park.

3) The TZ bridge toll is $4.50 one way, but I have the commuter plan which is $2.00 each for 20 trips.

Total cost (not counting wear and tear, depreciation, maintenance and insurance) is about $14.00 per day. I like to think in terms of before tax so I can count the cost as fraction of my gross salary. That would be more than $20 a day. That means that I have to have to make an extra $4,800 per year to pay for the cost of commuting.

This is actually cheap compared to the commute to wall street that I used to make. That was about $30 a day before taxes, but I was making $75/hour, but (sigh) those days are long gone and I have to count my pennies.

1) The bus costs $1.05 each way.

2) I have to drive 2 miles each way to catch the bus. That's $1 per day. I could walk to the bus, and I should, but so far that hasn't happened, as I need that extra half hour of sleep in the morning.

The Bus to work costs me $3.10 per day. I will be saving net after taxes about $11 per day which is $2,650 per year. (That's about $4,000 of my salary in savings.)

So, there is no logical choice but to take the bus.

An interesting point; you would think that the bus would be crowded with the economics so far in favor of the bus over driving. The bus, however, is only about half full. Almost everyone get's a seat to themselves with no one sitting next to them.

The morning bus leaves at 8:04am. There are two busses, an express and a local. The Express doesn't go all the way to my job, but stops only a block away. I can take either. They arrive at 20 or 10 minutes before 9. If I miss the first, I can take the next. If I miss either, I can get to work a little late by waiting a half hour. The bridge is normally backed up, but the schedule seems to take this into account.

There are several types of people on the bus.

First, are business people, mostly women, who are on their way to an office in White plains. There are not many men, so I guess us macho American types prefer to drive our gas guzzlers to work.

Second, are non-office workers going to jobs in White Plains. These might not have cars or the money to guzzle their way across the bridge.

Third, are families. There are always several women with children and couples who take the bus, but I am not sure why.

Last, are drug addicts going across the bridge to score crack in the relatively urban White Plains, or Yonkers. White Plains has a daytime weekday population estimated at 250,000 and is a conduit for drugs coming out of NY City. Westchester County has a resident population of about a million and would be considered a major urban center if it were not overshadowed by New York City just to the south.

In the morning there are mostly office types, mostly women. In general, the riders seem to be about half from India. The rest are Hispanic or Haitian.

The 4:30pm bus, coming back to West Nyack, is non-office workers. I would guess that most office workers would return at 5:30pm or 6:00pm. As a county worker, I am limited to working 7 hours a day because of the unions here, even if I am not in the union. I can get out of work at 4:30 and that is the major appeal of this job.

The bus is bouncy and I am prone to car sickness. The bus fumes are nauseating. I listened on my iPod to part of Ayn Rand's the Fountainhead (pretentious crap) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson (second rate William Burroughs). I finally settled on Jack London's The Sea Wolf, which is as good as it gets. I might bring a print book to read if I can fight off the motion sickness. I have an older tiny Toshiba Satellite laptop computer from Justine that is very cute, but a little slow. It is light and I can use it to try some writing. I have to charge up the battery and see how long it lasts.

One of these days I will have to get some pictures of the trip.