One of the most remarkable photos of a volcanic eruption ever taken apparently happened by sheer chance, when the ISS passed over the Kuril Islands just as the Sarychev Peak volcano let loose. The rising plume literally punched a near-circular hole in the cloud cover. Just in case you happen to see a nuclear weapon [...]
Posts from ‘June, 2009’
Fingerpainting with a Spoon
I surfaced yesterday after several days immersed in copyedits, which are done and returned now through chapter 8, of 12. (Another batch will fly out from NY on Monday, if I understand the sked correctly.) My publisher surprised me last night by sending me a first draft of the book’s catalog copy, which was so [...]
Odd Lots
Pete Albrecht alerted me to Collecta, an interesting twist on a general Web search engine, in that it gathers news being posted Right Now, and displays it item by item on the screen in realtime While You Wait. Alas, most of what it seems to index are tweets, which may just barely count as information, [...]
The Twilight of the Ad Era
I made a decision late last year without saying much about it: I won’t be using AdSense ads anymore. Now, I’m not going to remove them from existing pages, and I’m not going to shut my account down, but as you might have noticed if you’ve perused my articles over on junkbox.com, my new layouts [...]
Happy Beginnings vs. Happy Endings
Sixty years ago today, my parents were married, at St. Mary of Perpetual Help church on West 32nd Street in Chicago. It was a remarkable event, not so much because history will consider my parents remarkable (though I do) but because it was, well, unlikely. This remarkableness was not unique, but occurred countless times around [...]
The Cloud in Your Pocket
We’ve been getting rained on a lot this week, in more ways than one. Carol’s garden is going gangbusters, and I’ve never seen an explosion of wildflowers along my accustomed hiking paths as I’m seeing right now. There’s a bee shortage somewhere in the country, I’ve heard, but the little buggers are thronging the wildflowers [...]
Odd Lots
Have been reading copyedits and catching up on any number of things after five weeks away from home. We’re going to have real books out of the bindery on or about October 1. For the time being, I’ll be glad to just Not Be Doing Book anymore. (And that should be on or about June [...]
Souls in Silicon on Amazon at Cover
Boy, I sure wasn’t expecting this: An email this morning from Lulu informed me that my SF story collection Souls in Silicon was now being offered through Amazon Marketplace at its $11.97 cover price–not cover plus 30%, as I reported in my May 29, 2009 Odd Lots entry. It’s evidently a test program of some [...]
Jaunty Jackalope in Only 2:45
I finished and packed off the introduction to the book today, which doesn’t leave a great deal more to do. I’m still “discussing” how to handle my two ASCII charts, which I laid out in InDesign and exported as PDFs. It boggles to imagine that nobody there knows how to insert a PDF into a [...]
Odd Lots
Our good president is creating czars right and left, to the point where you can’t tell the czars without a program. So maybe we need a czar czar–I know a guy named Binks who could do the job… Jim Strickland sent me a decent video demonstration of superfluidity in liquid helium. Liquid helium had a [...]