- I’ve installed Lazarus 1.0 without mayhem, and have created a few simple programs with it. So far, no glitches. My recommendation is still cautious. Nonetheless, I’d be interested in hearing other people’s experiences with the new release.
- Carmine Gallo wonders why more people aren’t doing image-rich PowerPoint presentations. Um…it’s because drawing pictures is way hard compared to writing text. Why is there no mention of this either in the article or in the comments?
- Here’s a great timesaver: Instead of making political posts on Facebook, point to this. Done! Effortless! (Link courtesy S. Hudson Blount.)
- And if that doesn’t work for you, this may. (Link courtesy Jim Mischel.)
- I guess the evidence is piling up: It’s time to stand in front of the bathroom mirror and ask yourself: Does this political opinion make my head look small?
- I’m glad that somebody else besides me noticed that The Atlantic came back from the dead mostly by publishing articles calculated to raise people’s blood pressure. I was a very satisfied subscriber back in the 90s and early oughts, but I suspect now that I never will be again.
- Don’t believe what the MSM says about volcanoes. Or about DNA. Or maybe anything else.
- Maybe we can give them (the MSM) something for Christmas this year. And then tell them to put a sock in it.
- The article I mentioned in my September 8, 2012 Odd Lots about transistor radio manufacturers tacking unused transistors onto their circuit boards to up the transistor count was in fact “The Transistor Radio Scandal” by H. M. Gregory, in Electronics Illustrated for July, 1967; p. 56. Some manufacturers used transistors for diodes, which was maybe half a notch better. The article includes some mighty weird schematics, too. Worth digging for, if you have piles of old mags somewhere.
- If our understanding of solar physics is accurate, sunspots might become impossible (at least for awhile) by 2015 or 2020. (Full paper here.) The magnetic fields that create sunspots have been getting weaker by about 50 gauss per year for some time. Field strength is now at about 2000; once that value hits 1500 gauss, some research suggests that sunspots may not form at all. This is not new news, but it’s interesting in that it’s a bit of poorly understood science that most of us will live to see confirmed or falsified. At any rate, I’m guessing we will not be working Madagascar on half a watt into a bent paperclip again for awhile, as the late George Ewing WA8WTE used to say.
- I’ve identified a new trigger for Creeping Dread: Hearing the fans incrementally rev up on what was assumed to be an idle computer.
Odd Lots
My Hair Is ( Finally) On Fire
I’m certainly behind schedule. I’m modestly over (word) budget. I’m still wracked by doubts as to whether the whole loony concept makes sense. But today I experienced a breakthrough, and finally, as Jim Strickland so wonderfully puts it, began writing like “your hair is on fire.” My final, trademark Jeff Duntemann mayhem-filled action climax is well underway. I hope to finish it (and thus the book) in less than a week. To do that, my hair will have to be on fire and remain on fire for a little while longer.
I’ve done this before. I’ve actually done it a lot, which may, at least in part, explain my hairline. In my system of measurement, one “Writing Like Your Hair Is On Fire” unit is equal to 2,000 words captured in one 24-hour period. In my history as a fiction writer, I’ve achieved as many as 2.7 WLYHIOFs. In nonfiction I’ve managed 4.5–and that was back when my hair was vanishing at 40% the speed of light. No wonder.
Ten Gentle Opportunities has been an excruciating project for a number of reasons. It’s humor, and humor is hard. More than that, it’s a love story. It’s actually either two or two and a half love stories, depending on which Love Story standard unit you use. I’ve never written a love story. Now I’m writing two and a half of them, all at once. For the love stories to make sense, I also have to include an AI sex scene. It’s actually an AI menage a trois…but before anybody gets bent out of shape, I need to add that the AIs remain fully clothed throughout (Simple Simon is incapable of removing his clothes) and no naughty bits are mentioned whatsoever. Among humans, sex (as my mother so often insisted) may well be chemistry. Among the AIs of the Tooniverse, it’s undocumented kernel call 105.
For the past ten days I’ve been gnawing on the love story problem, writing a few hundred words, then yanking them out and writing another (different) few hundred words when the first batch didn’t look right. Humorous or not, I’m trying very hard to create characters with some depth to them, which means that character and relationship arcs are important. In this kind of writing, you can’t just reach for the starships anytime you get bored with the people. (I’m famous for that.) I have a plan, and I’m stickin’ to it. If it means blowing my self-imposed deadline, so be it.
As for the hair, hey: There is life after hair. I’m living proof.
Odd Lots
- My old friend and fellow early GTer Rod Smith has posted a great many excellent pictures he took at Chicon 7, including a book signing that I attended.
- My mother’s cat Fuzzbucket died yesterday, at 16 years and change. He outlived my poor mother by twelve years, and while skittish as a kitten eventually warmed to me. I’ve never had a cat (for obvious reasons, of which I have four right now) but of all the cats I’ve never had, Fuzzbucket was my favorite. He kept his own LiveJournal page, and the final entry brought a tear to my eye.
- For those who couldn’t attend Chicon and were cut off from viewing the Hugo Awards by an idiotic copyright protection bot, you’ve got another chance: The award ceremony will be re-streamed tomorrow night, September 9, at 7 PM central time.
- This morning’s Gazette had an ad for hearing aids, which bragged of their product having 16 million transistors. This is easier than it used to be, since all those transistors are in one container. Now, does anybody remember the days when ads bragged of radios containing six transistors?
- And while we grayhairs and nohairs are recalling transistor counts in the high single digits, does anybody remember the early Sixties scandal (reported in Popular Electronics, I think) in which Japanese manufacturers would solder additional transistors into simple superhet boards and short the leads together, just so they could advertise the box as a “ten-transistor” radio?
- Nice piece from Ars Technica on the deep history of the spaceplane.
- Bill Cherepy sent a link to a marvelous steampunk tennis ball launcher, used for getting pull-strings for antennas (and as often as not, the antennas themselves) into high or otherwise inaccessible places. Gadgets like this (albeit not in steampunk dress) have been around for a long time, and I posted a link to this one (courtesy Jim Strickland) back in March.
- Also from Bill (and several others in the past few days) comes word of a promising if slightly Quixotic attempt to preserve orphaned SF and fantasy. Here’s the main site. At least they’re offering money to authors and estates; most other preservation efforts (of pulp mags and old vinyl, particularly) are pirate projects most visible on Usenet.
- That said, there are projects that limit themselves to out-of-copyright pulps, like this one. One problem, of course, is knowing when a pulp (or anything else from the 1923-1963 era) is out of copyright. Copyright ambiguity only hurts the idea of copyright. We need to codify copyright and require registration, at least for printed works. I’m not as concerned about copyright’s time period, as long as the owners of a copyright are known. As I’ve said here before, I’m apprehensive about competing with hundreds of thousands of now-orphaned books and stories.
- I don’t eat much sugar anymore, but egad, there are now candy-corn flavored Oreos.
Worldcon Wrapup
It was a relief to step off the plane in Colorado Springs and grab a chestful of thin, dry air. I’ve lived in dry climates since early 1987, and I’ve lost my taste for late-summer Chicago mugginess. The toughest part of Chicon 7, which concluded on Monday, was going back and forth across the Chicago River between the Hyatt and the Sheraton and wondering if I were walking above the river or wading through it. The con went very well, considering my aversion to crowds. I got to see a lot of people I don’t see very much, granted that I missed a few. I heard some readings and workshopped a couple of stories with my friends from the 2011 Taos Toolbox workshop. And the Hugos, which I haven’t seen in person since (I think) 1986. John Scalzi was easily the best Hugos toastmaster I’ve seen since I began attending worldcons in 1974. He was funny, he was terse, he was great at improv, and he held the awards for the winners as they spoke their thank-yous into the mic. (There was nowhere else to put them.) He’s losing his hair and doesn’t shave his head–he certainly gets private points from me for that.
I was not aware of it at the time, obviously, but a misguided attempt at automated copyright protection killed the stream that Chicon was sending out to people who couldn’t be at the con. This was idiotic on so many levels–the video clips being “protected” had been given to the con by the studios specifically to be shown at the awards–and reminds us that robots should not be enforcers. Never.
The very idea of copyright, on which artists in many areas depend, is being weakened in the public mind by crap like this. If something eventually kills copyright, it won’t be the pirates.
I had a marvelous interview with the fiction editor at a major press, at which he agreed to read the manuscript for Ten Gentle Opportunities. Better than that, he took notes on my experience and my background (I brought both The Cunning Blood and one of my computer books) and suggested that what he might like even more from me than a humorous fantasy mashup was a good ripping hard SF action adventure.
I wondered for a moment: Gosh, could I do that? (Only a moment. A short moment. Ok, no moment at all.) I had intended to pursue my first Drumlins novel The Everything Machine after TGO was on its way. Now, I’m not so sure. The Molten Flesh is less far along, but it may get promoted to the top of the queue. We’ll see.
I did spend a fair bit of time with my sister and her girls down in the dealers room. (She and Bill publish and sell filk CDs as Dodeka Records.) As usual, I did a little shopping, emphasis on little. (We didn’t drive, so whatever I bought had to be packed home on what I call a “sewer-pipe jet.”) But I found something wonderful, as Dave Bowman notably said in 2010.
Across the aisle from Dodeka Records was Apogee Prime, a publisher specializing in aerospace books in several categories. They had a new book that, at 12″ X 14.5″, was mighty big for my creaky old suitcase, but I bought it anyway: 2001: The Lost Science. What we’ve got here are original photos, sketches, and literal blueprints of the technologies presented by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Much of the material was thought to be lost, and when the sequel 2010 was filmed in the early 1980s, a lot of it had to be re-created from scratch, often by having artists watch the original movie fifty times with sketchpads in their laps.
The book draws on the personal collection of Frederick I. Ordway III, who is a real rocket scientist and former colleague of Werner Von Braun, and worked on the Explorer 1 project. Kubrick hired Ordway to help him predict, as reasonably and realistically as possible, what space science would be like in the year 2001. This book is a good overview of his predictions, at least those that made it into the 1968 film. Satellites, space stations, nuclear propulsion systems–these were the aches that a certain class of nerdy 16-year-olds were feeling in 1968. For a good many reasons, only some of which I’ve discussed here, 2001 has long been and will likely remain my favorite film of all time. I remember those aches, and wear them proudly, as they are the aches of boys who dare to dream.
This is a coffee table book, but one that you may actually read cover-to-cover. (I’m not quite done but will be soon. There have been times when I’ve had to take a deep breath and set it down.) Softcover. $49. Very highly recommended.
Peace Through Superior Flier-Power
Worldcon, Day 3. I spent a goodly chunk of today helping Gretchen and Bill at their tables down in the dealer room. Part of this involved distracting Julie (my younger niece, age 4) who was bored and making Gretchen a little nuts. Her sister Katie is old enough to go to the kid programming room by herself; Julie still needs an adult escort, and will accept no substitutes for Mommy. Mommy, alas, had a table to run.
We did our best. I showed Julie how to make a paper airplane from a sheet of green construction paper and two paperclips that had been hanging out in the bottom of my briefcase. We got us a decent airplane together, and I tried hard to persuade her that aviation is more finesse than brute strength. She had a tendency to want to wind up and throw the plane with all her might; after a few demos she seemed to pick up on the fact that a little thrust in a straight line will work better than a roundhouse discus hurl. The plane flew, Julie was delighted, and Mommy got some much-needed peace.
All in the greater cause of growing up. My older cousin Diane taught me to make paper airplanes as well as other things, like pumping a swing. I was older than four, too. My catalog of Uncle Jeff Tricks is both deep and broad, but most require a little more physical maturity than either Katie or Julie have just yet.
I did notice with considerable pleasure that Katie was building things out of mainstream Lego (not MegaBlox) in the kid programming room. There is a Lego hoard in a corner of my workshop, awaiting the proper time. That time is coming soon.
Again, much of a good con is conversation, and I had quite a bit of that. I even spoke briefly with Harry Turtledove at his signing for Every Inch a King. I stood in awe of Steve Jackson’s creation called “Steampunk Chaos,” which is a sort of huge Rube Goldberg marble-track thingamajigger with a steampunk flavor that Steve has been assembling now for several years. He evidently builds a core machine and then invites bystanders to dig into his boxes full of loose parts and extend it. Most of the extenders were young teen boys, and by all accounts they were having a marvelous time. I took photos but none really captures the geeky bronze (painted) awesomeness of it all.
The crowds at Worldcon this year seem a little thin, both to me and to others that I spoke to this afternoon. Rumor has it that the organizer of DragonCon explicitly pledged to drive the SF Worldcon into the sea by siphoning off younger congoers, and he may well be succeeding. The response, of course, would be to hold Worldcon a little earlier, prompting at least some people to attend Worldcon first and exhaust their resources before DragonCon. That may or may not work, but the graying of Worldcon was painfully obvious, and it would be well worth a try.
More visiting tomorrow, maybe a little more shopping, and a long-awaited chance to pitch Ten Gentle Opportunities to a major publisher. Stay tuned.
Dispatch from Gormenghast-on-the-River
Worldcon, Day 2. I’ve been in this hotel before. I’ve wandered through its subterranean halls, furiously poking bits into my wetware geolocation memory register, without much useful success. I feel like a cat looking for his litterbox in Gormenghast…along with a thousand other cats. It’s the most chaotic Worldcon venue I’ve ever experienced. It’s about as orthagonal as the Intel x86 architecture. It’s as…
Ok, ok, I’ll stop bitching. Much looking at maps allowed me to get to a lot of places and get a fair bit done. 10 out of 13 students from my 2011 Taos Toolbox workshop are at the convention (as are instructors Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress) and we actually held a brief critique session at Carole Moleti’s kaffeeklatsch noonish. I sat in a couple of readings and spoke at length with a great many people I don’t see very often. Over lunch I tried to get the K9 email client for Android running on my Transformer Prime, without complete success. I would try again but I had free Wi-Fi at The Corner Bakery. Here in my room at the Sheraton, it would be another $13.95 for a day, on top of the $13.95 I’m already paying for my laptop’s connection.
The discussion topic of the house seems to be, “W(h)ither zombies?” Are they past their expiration date? Is there any more meat to be chewed on that bone? Is the corpse still twitching?
Consensus seems to be, Yes–but ya gotta have a twist. I had a moment to think about twists this afternoon, and if I wanted to do a zombie novel I think I have a good one. I won’t bore you with it right now, but I’ll offer a clue: It’s a straightforward extension of something I’ve written about before in an SF story.
David Brin asked me what time it was. I answered, “4:22.”
In loose moments I’m reading The Quantum Dot by Richard Turton. Nice item, a little dry, but the best summary I’ve seen so far.
A filk popped into my head this morning. I’ll quote the refrain. If you know music at all you’ll get the joke:
Seven ugly shelves, made out of wood;
Tall and thin they were.
Into the writer’s house they went;
His paperbacks to bear.
There’s more, but I need to work on the rhyme.
And I’m about out of time this evening. Supper looms. Not sure where it looms, but it’s making loom noises. Or maybe that’s my stomach. I’ll find out shortly.
Worn Out in the Big City
Just got downtown here in Chicago for the World Science Fiction Convention, Chicon 7. I have a nice room on an upper floor of a good hotel, and pointedly not at the Hyatt, the main convention location. That was deliberate. I like peace and quiet, especially when I try to sleep, and I’ve been to enough Worldcons to know that I’m peculiar in that regard.
Ok, sure, I’m peculiar in a lot of other regards too. But for the next couple of days, that’s the big one.
Crowds have always made me uneasy. This was true even 35-odd years ago when I worked downtown just a few blocks south of here. I was in and out of office buildings all day, fixing Xerox machines, so I was down there on the sidewalks flowing with the trudging masses more than most people do on any given day. After that there was the ride home on the El, packed like bits in a Zip file. I didn’t find it exhilarating. I found it exhausting. I never knew just how exhausting until I bought a very Cleaver-ish white house in a tidy, quiet Rochester NY picket-fence suburb. Carol and I could sit on our patio on temperate days and have supper without hearing anything but birds, lawnmowers, and the occasional truck on Monroe Avenue. Our biggest challenge was keeping Mr. Byte from raiding the strawberry patch when we weren’t looking.
As my friends know, I am not shy and retiring in the least. I’ve given many speeches and seminars to large-ish audiences, including one that must have been close to a thousand people. I even did standup comedy once, though I did have some help and a very workable crowd.
I’ve never been stepped on at a soccer riot, nor squeezed in front of a stage at a rock concert. I can only conclude that a preference for quiet living is genetic. I wonder if it’s maybe yet another survival-selected holdover from my cave-dwelling ancestors, who knew in their guts that when too many Neanderthals hung out in the same place, skulls got bashed and the hunting got thin.
So in a few minutes I’ll throw this thing in the room safe and thread my way down into the pandemonium that is a Worldcon. I have people to see that I don’t see very often, books to buy (and sign; I’ll be at the ISFiC Press table at some point) and a meeting with an editor who has expressed interest in Ten Gentle Opportunities. As always it will be a cortisol thrill-ride, and tonight I will gladly vanish back up here and leave the all-night partying to those better adapted than I.
More as it happens.
Odd Lots
- Here’s more evidence that you should never, but never use Adobe Reader, especially on Linux. I haven’t used it for a couple of years, and if a machine comes into my care with that bugfarm on it I uninstall it immediately. I tried the free version of Tracker Software’s PDF XChange, then bought the pro version, and I’ve been using it ever since. Highly recommended.
- No matter what PDF reader you use, make very sure that you disable Javascript in the reader. JS is probably the second most dangerous thing in the software world right now, after unbounded string functions. Fortunately, you can turn JS off a lot easier than you can spot software that still uses unbounded string functions.
- Having hand-made countless hookup wire jumpers for breadboard work in my life (or at least since 1975, when I first got a push-down breadboard together) I was pleased to see a brilliant hack in Make: soak the glue off a block of ordinary desk stapler staples with acetone, and they make perfect (if short) jumpers.
- From the same trip through the Make Blog comes a goofy and rather literal “third hand” for inspection, soldering, etc. If one of those came to, um, hand, I might even try it, though I think I’d stop short of the nail polish.
- I’ve seen a fair number of Wi-Fi ad hoc networks come and go since I got into Wi-Fi in 1999, and all of them were far more trouble than they were worth. Byzantium looks better on a number of counts, and I wonder if any readers have tried it.
- I used to burn these in my wood stove, and now we’re told that the entire global economy rests on them. It probably does. Alas, they’re mostly not made of wood anymore.
- Also from Slate: Kids who passed the marshmallow test not only did better in nearly all aspects of life, but they weigh less at age 45. Their super-power may be simple impulse control, or it may be more than that: I’ve long suspected that some people are simply addicted to wanting. If it isn’t the marshmallows it’ll be something else.
- From Tom Roderick comes word that we’ve finally gotten a maser to work at room temperature.
- There is a new PDF-based magazine devoted to the Raspberry Pi board. Considering that it’s ad-free and they’re not charging for it, I think it’s pretty well done.
Harry Harrison, Gentleman Atheist, RIP
65,000 words. This is still hard. But I am damned well going to make it work.
One reason I will make it work is a man who left this world today for other worlds, not that he was any stranger to other worlds. Harry Harrison is one of those guys who isn’t appreciated as much as he deserves, for reasons that escape me. Most people know of him for Slippery Jim Di Griz and little else. We forget that his story Make Room! Make Room! inspired Soylent Green. Almost nobody knows that he wrote the Flash Gordon newspaper comic strip in the 50s and 60s. (I didn’t know it until I read his obituary.) And I’m amazed that more people haven’t read what I consider just about his best work, The Daleth Effect. And what I do consider his best work may not be everybody’s choice, but too bad: The Technicolor Time Machine beats all.
When I was fresh out of the Clarion SF workshop in 1973, I cleaned up a Clarion story of mine and sent it to him. He bought it for $195, and when it appeared in his anthology Nova 4 the next year, I was (finally!) a published SF writer.
The story was “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” now in my collection Cold Hands and Other Stories. It’s about a slightly clueless Roman Catholic priest who manages to be sent as the Catholic chaplain to a church constructed on the Moon. When an industrial accident destroys one of the lunar base’s hydroponic gardens, a new garden is built under the transparent dome of the church. Father Bernberger is heartbroken. He’s lost his church…or has he?
It was a decent story for something written by a 21-year-old kid who was “young for his age.” But far more remarkable than that was the fact that Harry Harrison bought it at all. You see, Harry was an atheist, and said so as often as it took for people to get the message. So why would he buy a story about religion?
The one time I met him, at the SFWA reception at one of the late 70s Worldcons, I thanked him for buying the story, and asked him exactly that. (All the SMOFs had told me about him being hostile to religion.) He laughed and said, “It wasn’t about religion. It was about a man who had faith.”
He told me to keep writing. I did.
Now, I’ve taken a lot of kidding and scolding and eye-rolling down the years for being such a naif as to go to church every Sunday and even (egad) pray. I’ve seen a lot of desperately mean-spirited condemnation not only of religious nutters (as though there have never been atheist nutters) but also of the quietly religious people who tend the sick and feed the poor without making any attempt to convert them, nor saying anything more about it.
None of that from Harry Harrison, at least not that I’ve ever seen. He was a gentleman atheist who gave me a push by publishing my story about a church and a priest, even though it went against the grain of his personal philosophy. He shook my hand and told me to keep going. He wrote good, engaging yarns that made me gasp and made me laugh, yarns that I freely admit to imitating. He is one reason (though not the sole reason) that I will not condemn atheism as my species of Catholicism is sometimes condemned.
Godspeed, good friend, however you may understand the wish.
Odd Lots
- For readers who are in the Colorado Springs area: All Breeds Rescue is hosting the 14th annual Romp in the Park this Saturday, August 11, at Norris Penrose Event Center. The event runs from 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM. Carol will be working it, and I should be there midafternoon with QBit.
- The Curiosity rover has a trick I didn’t hear about until after it landed: Its treads imprint a Morse code pattern in the sand or soft soil it crosses. The pattern spells JPL. Now that’s DX!
- From Ernie Marek comes a link to DRB’s very visual article on Project Orion, including a sketch of Niven/Pournelle’s Michael spacecraft from Footfall. I would have called it OBB, for “Old Boom-Boom.”
- Weird clouds are a minor interest of mine, and here’s a compendium from Wired that I missed when it first appeared in 2009.
- New Zealand’s Tongariro volcano just erupted–and it was a complete surprise. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Erik Klemetti’s Eruptions blog on Wired before, but it’s well worth following if you have any interest at all in volcanic phenomena. Erik has a helluva constituency: The comments occasionally contain better insights and links than the blog itself!
- Memories sometimes just appear out of nowhere, and the other day I remembered these. My next thought was, Nah, you imagined that! But they did exist, and when I was 13 or 14 they were first-run and I used them.
- Ballotpedia has a fascinating listing of the net worth of congresspeople and senators. First insight: We are ruled by multimillionares. I am not disturbed that some of our representatives are multimillionares. I am disturbed that virtually all of them are. Second insight: Compare the net worth of Democratic vs. Republican senators. Things are not what you’d expect.
- From the Hardware WTF File: The ASUS Transformer Prime’s otherwise excellent keyboard dock does not have a delete key. Shift-Backspace is as close as it gets.
- And on the outside chance that you too have a Transformer Prime keyboard dock, here’s a list of keyboard shortcuts.
- Newsweek will probably cease print publication later this year. A lot of people have never forgotten their mean-spirited and idiotic 2009 cover story, “The Case for Killing Granny,” and I personally cannot wait to see that thing rot in its grave.
- David Plotz does not like August. Me, I could do without March.
