{"id":113,"date":"2008-11-21T17:40:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T21:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=113"},"modified":"2008-12-13T22:39:02","modified_gmt":"2008-12-14T02:39:02","slug":"odd-lots-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=113","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>My editor at John Wiley called and indicated that they want                  me (finally!) to rewrite <i>Assembly Language Step By Step<\/i>                  for a new edition in the spring of 2010. This will be a big job,                  since DOS will be jettisoned completely (and real mode relegated                  to a hisorical footnote) and a huge chunk of the book will have                  to be rewritten almost from scratch. More on this in coming days.<\/li>\n<li>OEM Parts in Colorado Springs (our local surplus house) is moving                  to a new and larger building about 2 miles north of their current                  location on Palmer Park. I was there with Mike Sargent the other                  day and discovered that everthing was half price. Got a bunch                  of Compactron tubes, some NOS Miller coils, a dozen or so high-ohmage                  1-W carbon resistors, and a roll of emery cloth for $22. The new                  address is 3029 N. Hancock. They weren&apos;t entirely sure when they                  new location would open. Phone first: 719-635-0771<\/li>\n<li><i>PC Magazine<\/i> is going &#8220;all digital.&#8221; That means                  they&apos;re dropping the print edition. The last printed issue will                  January 2009. I remember when that damned thing was an inch and                  a half thick. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>A wine to avoid: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.schmitt-soehne.com\/mainframe.asp?lang=de&amp;e1=635\">Schmitt-Sohne                  Relax Cool Red<\/a>, which is a dornfelder so bad I drank one glass                  and dumped the rest. No wine has gotten that treatment since <a href=\"http:\/\/www.threethieves.com\/\">Three                  Thieves Zinfandel<\/a>, and before that, Bully Hill&apos;s Sweet Walter,                  which still holds the prize as the worst single wine I have ever                  tried.<\/li>\n<li>Mars is evidently not as dry as we thought: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciam.com\/article.cfm?id=red-planet-alert-massive\">Glacier-sized                  water-ice glaciers (and not snowdrift-sized glaciers) have been                  reliably detected<\/a> by way of the SHARAD radar system on the                  Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter. Some of this stuff is half a mile                  thick, and you can do interesting things with such quantities                  of volatiles, water most of all. I recall an entry in my SF story                  ideas file from many years ago: <i>Somebody has begun terraforming                  Mars\u2014but nobody knows who<\/i>.<\/li>\n<li>While we&apos;re talking Mars, Pete Albrecht alerted me to the impending                  release of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0363240\/\"><i>Christmas                  on Mars<\/i><\/a>, a new film billed as &#8220;avant-garde SF,&#8221;                  which in my experience generally means &#8220;filmed in somebody&apos;s                  basement.&#8221; The major character is Major Syrtis. Nyuk-nyuk.<\/li>\n<li>And while we&apos;re talking space, it&apos;s worth noting that <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2007\/11\/average-america.html\">the                  average American thinks that NASA gets <i>25%<\/i> of the $2.7T                  federal budget<\/a>. (!!!!) The truth is 0.58%.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My editor at John Wiley called and indicated that they want me (finally!) to rewrite Assembly Language Step By Step for a new edition in the spring of 2010. This will be a big job, since DOS will be jettisoned completely (and real mode relegated to a hisorical footnote) and a huge chunk of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}