Keith Grahams Wanderings

Windows Live Writer

2008-05-07T20:00:00.001-04:00

I am posting this from a nice piece of software from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer. It allows you to use a nice editor instead of the JavaScript html editors that Blogger and other blog packages use. It works nicely. It doesn't scramble your html and it lets you put images on the page where you want without having to hand code the tags.

The only bad thing is the title doesn't let you add a link to it so you have to edit the entry again from blogger.

I shows the blog entry using the style of your blog so you can see how it looks while you are typing. It also spell checks with the word dictionary so it knows about my technical words already.

I like it. Normally Microsoft is the enemy, but this is nice.

Windows Live Writer - Overview

Confucius Quote via John

2008-05-07T12:14:00.003-04:00

"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat."
---Confucius

I recently tried to listen to the Analects of Confucius, but I could not get far with it. This brand of oriental wisdom is interesting on first read, but then you think: how the hell does this affect my life? How often do you look for a black cat in a dark room when there is no cat there? Even metaphorically, this is not something that I do often enough to warrant a maxim.

Perhaps it should be re-written:

The hardest thing of all is to Google a complex search phrase, especially if a word is misspelled.
---Keith

This makes more sense, but still not all not anywhere near the hardest thing in life.

My immediate need is for an example using MyEclipse to access a JNDI database connection. MyEclipse is a Java tool and it is woefully ignorant of JNDI connections on the embedded Tomcat server. It looks like the only way to do this is to hand craft the XML file. This crap is supposed to make programming easier, not harder. No search phrase that I tried seems to come up with an answer. Talk about your black cats in a dark room!

Little Brother � Download for Free

2008-05-07T10:34:00.000-04:00

Cory Doctorow has his book Little Brother available for free download. This seems to work for Cory. The Making Light blog praises the book, but then again, they are in the book selling business. It is the experience of several big names that a free download results in more sales because the online reading experience sucks. I downloaded the PDF version and I found the two column format unreadable. After I scrolled through the dozen or more pages of self-advertising I tried reading the story and the constant twitching of the scroll bars in order to read frustrated me quickly. I am guessing that the text and html versions are much better. My reasoning was that the PDF version would contain the most polished presentation. I was wrong.

Maybe on a book reader the stuff would present better.

Robert J. Sawyer has been discussing book appliances. I am not sure that these are a good idea, either. The Kindle ($400) locks you out of most free content (although there is a hack), and the iRex iLiad ($700) and Sony Reader PRS-500 ($250) are nothing more than book shaped computers that lack the ability to anything but display books. It would be far more efficient to buy a Dell Inspiron for $500 (or wait until the Vostro goes on sale for $399, again), load up mobi-reader software and acrobat reader and you will have a machine that can surf the web and do email in addition to presenting books.

If you must, start with the Franklin eBookman ($80 on Amazon). It is small and light, but readable and the price is right. Cory's book is available in eBookman format in a few places.

Slush pile at F&SF

2008-05-07T09:35:00.000-04:00

GVG posted the slush pile for May 3 and 5. (click to get big picture) He had already taken 6 off the pile. By my count there are about 50 subs there. I guess you have to be very very good to float up to the top of a pile like that.

If they are getting 25 to 30 subs a day, they can't be reading every story to the end - it's physically impossible. A good editor will skim the first page and make a decision to flush the story or keep checking. The editor might skip to the end and see how the money shot works out, or if the writing is compelling he might read the story straight through.

When you sub to F&SF there are several "code" phrases in the rejection. The phrase "didn't grab my interest" means that GVG or JJA did not make it through the first page. "Didn't hold" means it went further. "Nice writing here" means one of them read the whole thing. They are all rejections. I usually get the "Didn't grab" and once I got a "Didn't hold".

Sidney H. Sime

2008-05-06T14:12:00.002-04:00

A few years ago, Erica and I went on a day trip and became thoroughly lost in western New Jersey. We stopped at an antiques mall and I purchased a framed page from a 19th century magazine of a Genii. It was by Sidney H. Sime. I did a web search at the time, but I found very little information.

I did not think about it and the picture is somewhere in the attic. I came across some illustrations for Lord Dunsany's King of Elfland's Daughter and I recognized the artist. Sime is making something of a comeback.

I want to find the picture and scan it, but it may be buried too deep.

Here is a montage that someone did for youtube. These are black and white for the most part. My magazine page is in color.

Elvis Aaron Presley JR.

2008-05-06T12:38:00.000-04:00

One of the people on one of the boards that I check had this story.

I was wearing a shirt with a guitar on it at dinner tonight, and this hillbilly family asked me if the guitar pictured was Elvis's guitar.

So, of course I said " only a guitar player would ask that !". thinking it was a good conversation started.

Wow .. For the next 15 minutes .. they didn't shut up!

This family of four, who barely had a full set of teeth among them, gave this long oral history of "Elvis Aaron Presley Jr" (did you know E has a son out of wedlock?) which they know as a long time family friend (did I mention that the 45 year old son sitting with them had a Elvis hair dew and side burns .. keep singing passages of E songs?). They produced this video on the son's cell phone of Araon' Jr. singing with *dad* ...

They assured me that E is alive, and they have met him in 1980's after his death. The *mother* sang with E during the 1970's in gospel churches around Memphis at that time and they had become friends.

what'ch think ?

This is why I think it is good to be alive. Wonderful things like this keep happening in the world. I think that reality exists for no other reason than to keep me entertained.

Mucho Spamo

2008-05-06T12:12:00.003-04:00

I was getting complaints that I did not respond to my email. I discovered that somewhere along the line I had turned off the kpgraham@harpamps.com and kpgraham@jt30.com. When I turned them back on, I started getting a few emails, but I also started receiving over 400 spam messages a day. My spam filters got almost all of it, but I still have to browse the spam to see if there is anything that was misclassified.

I wend back to JT30.com and Harpamps.com and I searched for Mailto: and the javascript that I created to obsfucate the email and I replaced them with a link to a contact.php page. The page I created will mail me if a human actually fills out the form and clicks submit. I have a captcha image to verify the humanity and I strip out html before I mail it.

Now I will only get human mail, hopefully. I have shut off the bad emails again, making them output to null. Spammers will waste their time mailing to me using these emails.

If you want the very simple php code that does this, download the zip file in the link below. You just need to change the verbiage on the page and the email address in the code so that you receive the mail and not me.

kpgcontact.zip

Teleplay: Delilah and the Space Rigger

2008-05-06T09:18:00.002-04:00

Subterranean Press has a teleplay by Robert Heinlein available for reading on their site. Anyone who calls Heinlein a sexist should read the original story.

You should not be surprised that a Science Fiction writer, targeting a predominantly male, mostly over thirty educated audience would say that women can't contribute in a meaningful way to the exploration of space. Women in space are not only important, but essential.

Only Heinlein could have written that women and men have worked side by side for as long as there's been a human species. It is not only natural, but part of our makeup.

The teleplay, though, plays up the sex angle and leaves out Heinlein's philosophical views on the subject. Make sure that you read the original story to get the full impact of this ground breaking story.

Spot that Writer

2008-05-06T09:03:00.000-04:00

The Crotchety Old Fan has a graphic of 45 Spec-Fic Writers.

Go over there and see how many you can recognize.

I was able to spot only 12.

Barbara Feldon - Still Hot

2008-05-04T17:48:00.003-04:00

The cool thing about the torrents is that I can download almost any TV show or Movie, burn it to DVD and watch it when TV sucks (which is mostly). I watched The Night Stalker and season one of X-files. I have the complete House M.D. on DVD and last night I watched a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode for the first time in about 40 years.

The episode was The Never-Never Affair from the 1964-65 season. It featured Barbara Feldon who later would appear in Get Smart. This episode was from before MFU degenerated into cutesy nonsense and was still in Black and White. I remember that the show went down hill when they switched to color.

Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn), and Russian Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum) looked about 12 years old in the show. David McCallum is a regular in NCIS and it is good to see him working.

Barbara suffered a little from becoming type-cast as a spy girl, but she was beautiful and interesting, especially to a 13 year old Keith. When I watched this old show, I was surprised to see how hot she was and is.

The Girl With the Error Message Eyes

2008-05-02T15:44:00.000-04:00

My story is up at AtomJack.

The Girl With the Error Message Eyes

Call For Submissions: HAUNTED LEGENDS

2008-05-01T10:41:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting concept. They are looking for new twists on old ghosts. I happen to have a couple of unsold ghost stories and a partially written one that I think has a bit of potential. They are not open for subs yet, but by the time they are I might have a story ready.

Pays 6 cents a word. That's about $200-$300 a story. Sharpen your pencils readers.

Call For Submissions: HAUNTED LEGENDS

Moss Acres - Gardening with moss and growing moss

2008-05-01T10:06:00.000-04:00

I have some dark shady areas in my yard that won't grow grass. The grass seed starts and then it dies back in the summer. Recently I was at a garage sale where the entire yard was moss and I thought to myself, self, you should try this.

There was an article today in the New York Times about growing moss and they give the link to moss farms.

I am ordering the starter kit to see how it does in the bad areas in my yard.

Moss Acres - Gardening with moss and growing moss

Microsoft Visual Studio Express

2008-05-01T09:24:00.002-04:00

Microsoft has released the FREE versions of their Visual Studio Suite. I downloaded it because I maintain a bunch of small Visual Basic applications and I use Visual Studio to do this. You can also get a very powerful web page editor and C# and C++ development environments.

I do entirely too much work in Java, which Microsoft does not support. I wish that it did because I find Eclipse, JBuilder and other development environments clunky and not intuitive. This is probably because Java itself has become so clunky and counter intuitive.

I came to the Visual studio editing environment way back when it was still VB version 2. It has grown, but I still think that it is the king of editors. I much prefer it to any other editor. That being said, it is the least used of the editors on my machine. I use Notepad++ for most things. I use Dreamweaver when I need to tweak a web page gui. I use Eclipse for new Java development and I use JBuilder for my older Java apps where I have already built a complex project.

If you are a student and wish to learn VB, by all means download the VB component and go through the tutorials. That's how I got started and I eventually wrote a dozen or more huge systems using VB.

If you publish web pages and need a serviceable web editor then download the internet developer component. It has way too many bells and whistles, but it gives you total control over the web page including extensive CSS editing. Just make sure that you test the results in FireFox, and please don't use any Front Page specific code on the pages.

The TiECON/Chitika Blogpreneur Contest 2008

2008-04-30T21:24:00.002-04:00

Blogging has evolved into a small but powerful force in cyberspace. Harnessing this force is more difficult than one would expect, and this is due to the great variety of Blogs. It is not like an entrepreneur can devise a plan to utilize blogging in a business plan and expect it to succeed. Motivating bloggers is like herding cats.

Blogs are not usually started with a conscious goal. Bloggers are not coldly rational businessmen. Blogs are not read to simply acquire information. Blogs, in short, are not work related.

Blogs are driven by passion.

I�ve seen the blogs with the scan of a Google check proving some blogger made thousands of dollars. Bloggers, though, seldom make much money and blogs started with the express intent to generate income are generally failures.

The blogs that are read are the blogs that inspire passion. The blogs that inspire passion are written with passion. Blogging is not a mechanical process where a blogger can follow a dozen simple steps and create a blog that people will read. Good blogs are written by people who deeply care about their subject matter and who can translate their care into exciting blog entries.

For a blog to be successful, it must have a new entry every day or so. Readers do not return to a static page more than a few times, but a reader will bookmark a blog that has a unique and interesting entry posted on a regular basis. For a blogger to come up with an interesting entry every day or so, the blogger must feel passion for his entries. It is too much trouble to find a boring entry for a boring blog on a regular basis.

If a blogger feels strongly about something, no matter how silly, stupid or odd, there is a certainty that there are several thousand people who also feel strongly about the same stupid, silly or odd stuff. It is just a matter of time before all these people find each other. The internet is so large and Googling is so powerful that it would be impossible to keep them apart.

There is no secret formula. There is no methodology that makes blogs good. There is just passion and a willingness to communicate that passion.

If you have any ideas or clues as to what makes a good blog. You can enter the Chitika Blogpreneur Contest by creating a blog entry and putting the badge below on your blog.

The Chitika Blog � The TiECON/Chitika Blogpreneur Contest 2008

Baskin-Robbins 31 Cent Scoop Night

2008-04-30T12:41:00.000-04:00

I don't know, but I thought that Erica might be interested in going out tonight:

Baskin-Robbins 31 Cent Scoop Night

The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches

2008-04-29T13:16:00.002-04:00

I received a spat of new cliches for the list. Since I am only giving the list a temporary home, I was reluctant to alter it.

I gave in and created a form where users could add to the list. The list is now open for spam and abuse, so I will have to monitor it for a while. I used my little antispam CAPTCHA image to test for humans, but even real humans put stupid stuff on the page. I will have to check for a variety of bad things that are not sciencefictional. This may be a bad idea.

Friday at Work

2008-04-25T15:55:00.002-04:00

It's about 4pm, I have nothing I want to work on, and I have to kill some time before I can sneak out.

I just finished Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. I must confess that I've read a Zane Grey book or two before and was not impressed. I am a big fan of Louis L'Amour, and I felt that Louis did a better job with the western genre.

But, Riders is not much like any western that I've ever read. It is about a group of men and women struggling against the corruption and greed of the Mormon Church in 1871. Mormons are not treated well in this book. This was before Mormonism gave up polygamy and part of the plot is about a pious Mormon woman who does not want to marry a Mormon Bishop who has other wives, not because of the wives, but because she doesn't love him.

The plains of northern Utah are covered with purple sage and part of the charm of the book is the wonderful descriptions of the purple sage and the romantic landscape. The descriptions take your breath away at times.

The characters are very compelling. There is a young rider who accidentally shoots a girl who is riding with some rustlers and nurses her back to life. There is the mysterious gunfighter named Lassiter. There is the beautiful and rich Mormon woman struggling with her faith.

This is all wonderfully told and woven together with a plot that could have been a Greek tragedy or a play by Shakespeare. It is absolutely riveting. Grey takes a while to bring the plot up to speed, but the second half of the book, with its awesome imagery and breathtaking pace is as good as I've ever read.

TV and Movie westerns have probably prejudiced us against the western genre. When I had written a western story, I couldn't find even one online ezine publishing western stories, yet there are hundreds of spec-fic ezines. This is a great loss because I think that the Western is a very basic and essential genre and worth reading and writing.

I suggest your put your preconceived notions away for a few days and give Riders of the Purple Sage a chance. If you're like me you'll find yourself Googling the the internet for the sequel. There must be a sequel - I want to find out what happened to these people!

GoogleSyndication.com blocked

2008-04-25T15:28:00.002-04:00

My workplace uses WebSense.com to "protect" its employees from bad sites. It blocks YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and other websites. It seems to block sites with the word Download or Hack in the HTML title. Naturally, I take offense to this, because I would love to spend my day watching YouTube or browsing Flickr.

I just noticed that there were no ads appearing on my websites the last time I checked them and traced it to WebSense blocking googlesyndication.com. Googlesyndication is the web site that delivers AdSense ads. I think that the county may be in trouble with this decision. They are in actuality allowing its employees to surf websites without allowing them to see the ads. In effect they are cheating the websites out of a portion of the revenue that the surfing would normally incur.

The county is probably trying to cut down on the bandwidth of its network pipes. If they can cut ads and some other traffic, their internet gateway expense may be lower in the long run. This is good for the county and good for the tax payers.

It is bad for anyone who is running a free service subsidized by Adsense ads. The county is stealing from these sites.

Many people run FireFox just so they can run AdBlock with it and avoid seeing the dancing baloney that slows down so many websites. I even recommend it. This is different than an entire county, that is supposed to serve all of the people in the county, denying web site owners the ability to make a few cents.

I wonder how much more money my websites would make if corporate, educational and governemental networks did not block advertising.

SpecFicL Mailing List - Speculations Replacement?

2008-04-25T13:38:00.004-04:00

Back before the web, when all I had was email, I joined Blues-L. This is a mailing list. I signed up and I received messages from Blues lovers all over the world. If I answered a message, rather than going to the message author, the response was sent to the list server and got sent to everyone on the list.

The advantages of a list server is that there is no central web page. You get individual messages or a daily digest of all messages for the day right in your email in basket. No one actually knows your personal email address, so you are relatively anonymous.

Email lists are usually lively and more immediate than web pages. They encourage discussion in the way a BBS cannot do. Spammers have not yet infiltrated list servers because you have to sign up and wait for approval and have a valid email address.

I started the SpecFicL list. It seems odd to me that no one has done this, but after a little Googling, I could not find an active list for science fiction. There is a mostly dead list for Science Fiction movies, but nothing currently active.

I decided to do this because Speculations.com closed. Speculations was the liveliest discussion forum that I have ever been on, but the spammers killed it. I also suspect that they may have been sued by the Publish America, because there was so much discussion about them.

If you are interested in SF and writing SF, please try out the list. We'll see if anything comes of it. It is easy to unsubscribe if you don't like it. A word of warning, that if this becomes popular, there will be a good deal of traffic. A friend once described a List as trying to drink from a fire hose. This probably won't take off, but then again it just might.

Join the SpecFicL List

Justine's MacBook Air

2008-04-25T11:54:00.002-04:00

Justine sent pictures. Her iPhone camera is pretty poor, but you get the idea. The other computer is her older one, which I am lobbying to get. It might require me to drive to the city with my brother and rough her up, though.

Cult Book List

2008-04-25T10:10:00.000-04:00

The London Telegraph listed the top 50 cult books, and I am blogging it because I have determined from the list that I must belong to a cult.

Of the 50, I have read more than a few of these. Often, I find these are lists of books made popular in the last 10 years and I am not a reader of popular books. I have read more than half. I have not read many recent books, so the newer ones on the list are a mystery to me.

Here are the ones that are on the list that I like.

- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - Probably the best Vonnegut - It leaves you in a cold sweat
- The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell - I think the it is the most intensely beautiful book(s) that ever written. I re-read it recently and have been inspired by ideas in the book.
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - I haven't read this in 35 years, but it did change my views on war and society.
- The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger - I felt that I was Holden Caulfield when I read this as a teenager.
- The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley - This book explains how to think about our senses. It was a hippie book.
- Dune by Frank Herbert - Maybe the best all around SF book. I have read it at least 10 times by my count.
- The Hitchhiker�s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - As a programmer I am intrigued by the number 42.
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe - Turned me on to Kerouac and the Beats.
- G�del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter - brain candy.
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - Good, very intense book, but I was not as impressed as some. I must read it again.
- Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly - repackaging of Jung, but a good way to look at our cultural DNA.
- On The Road by Jack Kerouac - What an asshole, but I read and re-read it.
- The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran - I haven't thought about this for years. It is romantic fluff, but it sticks with you.
- The Rub�iy�t of Omar Khayy�m tr by Edward FitzGerald - I love the existential beauty of this.
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - Another book read as a teenager that seems to echo on and on.
- The Stranger by Albert Camus - I read this when I was a depressed 14 year old and it struck home.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - hard work, and unpleasant conclusions, but full of brilliant moments.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig - Pirsig's philosophical journey is wonderful, even if the arrival point is dissapointing.

It is near unbelievable that I have read more than half on the list and that I agree with these 18 at least as being very important books.

These books should be on the list.

- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein - This is still a cult book and a good read.
- Rats Lice and History by Hans Zinsser - My Dad gave me this. It is the history of Plagues done very very well. I keep finding people who include this on their top 10 list.
- One Two Three Infinity by George Gamow - Seriously turned me on to Science and Math. This book has influenced more modern scientists than you can believe.
- Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - It was a cult book until they made those awful movies.
- Neuromancer by William Gibson - The only book where I started over again on page one when I finished the last page. In 1990s I had decided that SF was dead. When I read this book I started plotting out stories that I eventually wrote down. Gibson made me want to write again. It is a very hard book to read and I don't casually recommend it, but it is well worth the effort.

I am at work and have to look busy. Someday I'll make a longer list of influential books.

Bloggers, you might want to check out the list on the telegraph and see if you agree with any of them.

50 best cult books - Telegraph

Being an only child, Nyack is not use to sharing

2008-04-24T15:07:00.001-04:00

Being an only child, Nyack is not use to sharing
Originally uploaded by kjdrill

I received a google alert about a Flikr photo set about a family of Lions at the San Diego Zoo and one feisty kitten in particular named Nyack.

Southern Fried Weirdness

2008-04-24T14:24:00.000-04:00

I was born in North Carolina and spent summers in Garden City, South Carolina when I was a kid. I stayed up the street from Mickey Spillane's house. (Years later I met Spillane's niece who claimed to remember me.) Although I've lived most of my life within an easy bus ride from New York City and talk like a noo yawker, I have these well hidden southern roots.

A while back I sent a story to Southern Fried Weirdness. It was a very weird flash story with a southern theme. They never published it and I chalked it up to my bad luck with editors. Too many times they either lose my story, or if they buy it, forget that they have it.

Well T.J. over at SFW lost the story. I made the mistake of asking him what's up this week (about nine months after the sale). He found the story and upped my pay rate. He told me the story would appear in his new eZine and also appear in the print anthology coming out by the end of the year.

I have this feeling that if I just concentrate I can figure out this writing and publishing stuff, but mostly it just confuses me.

Southern Fried Weirdness | Southern Speculations

Justine's new MacBook Air

2008-04-24T10:47:00.003-04:00

Justine just sent me an email message from her brand new MacBook Air. She does this to annoy me.

It works.

Pictures to follow.