» Publishers, Monetize your RSS feeds with FeedShow: More infos (Show/Hide Ads)
Here’s a list of downloadable audio books for your mp3 player. I will start the downloads tonight and load up my ipod.
Most of these are not professionally done, but they are well performed, at least the ones that I just sampled. My only objections is that there is some echo added to a one of the readings to improve the depth of the reading. Echo or reverb goes a long way and should be used very sparingly.
Hey, I also discovered that I had a cafepress.com store where I actually designed a Phillip K. Dick T-Shirt and Mug. I checked the sales figures and I even sold a few, although CafePress sits on the cash until you reach some very high minimum.
Phillip K. Dick Mug
I’ve came across a bunch of stuff that I had at some of the domains that I let slide. I used to have a bunch of domains that I had ideas about suing, but I am letting a few of them expire.
One of the domains had some media oriented projects like the stencils I made of Speculative Fiction Authors. I saved these and now they are on this website.
Here’s Ray Bradbury and Lovecraft:
There is an article in Computer World about the future of super computers. They are talking about Exaflop systems.
Rudy Rucker, in his Software/Wetware books, discussed the future of computation and he felt that Teraflop machines would be common in the 2020s. Currently the fastest machines are Petaflop supercomputers.
The next highest step, Exaflop or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 18 zeros) floating point calculations per second is due around 2018.
No matter who you ask, an Exaflop exceeds the computing power of a human brain. Of course these super computers won’t be programmed to emulate a human brain, but they will be given problems that human genius cannot solve just by thinking.
The article talks about the Energy Department using this computer for Grid control and possibly designing an Atomic Fusion power generator. (This on the day it was announced that we are running out of Uranium for fission reactors.)
The computers will be used for the very complicated systems computing used to predict weather, but I think that analysis of the human genome and the modeling of human biology with the idea of curing disease will be important. The computer will be capable of designing billions of possible drugs and then testing them on genetic models refining the results so that shortly after these Exaflop computers appear there will be cures for all diseases.
2018, by the way, is right in line with estimates for the Singularity. I want to believe!
My cat Max crashed today. He couldn’t stand up and was really scary looking. We too him to the vet. He’s on all kinds of medication for his bad thyroid. We’ve been careful to make sure he eats and he has gained weight.
He is dehydrated now. They are giving him ringers to rehydrate him and he will probably feel better almost immediately, but we have to leave him at the vet for a day or two. Max hates the vet.
I hope we can address the underlying cause of the dehydration. This was very frightening. I though that we were going to lose him and he’s not out of the woods, yet.
An alternate Star Trek pilot has surfaced. The first Trek pilot was rejected. Roddenberry made another, much of which made it into a later episode.
The video is odd and choppy, especially the opening credits, but it is fun to see how Trek evolved as it was being created.
Never-before-seen ‘Star Trek’ pilot found – The Live Feed | THR.
indenti.ca has a Twitter alternative that can be used in conjunction with Twitter, but seems to be designed for more serious information sharing.
Adicus Ryan Garton at Atomjack magazine has been these “dents” (as opposed to tweets) to post his rejections. I know because I have been waiting with bated breath for my reject.
I enjoyed the following rejection notice: rejected: reincarnation (twice!), nazis, twist ending.
I guess that the writer did not heed my No Nazis law on this site.
I like this. I will watch for my notice to come up – It will read: Reject: Robots, nigerian scam, teleogy, numerous typos.
93 days and waiting. Adicus can’t be recording all of them – just the doozies.
I have two stories waiting. One of them has been out for 92 days. Three months is a long time to sit in the slush. I think that I might have sold this story three or four times by now, but I chose a venue that had all of its editors quit a while ago and it is taking a long time for the one reader left to work through the pile. Reports have it that the reader is rejecting stories that are about 95 days in the slush so that I might hear before the end of the weekend. I am walking on thin eggs (as Jim’s Mom was fond of saying).
The other story is at a site where I heard that the editor has just cleaned out the slush so my story is one of the next he’ll read. This story has been sitting around for a while because I needed to punch it up. I tried to make it stronger, but it is not a slam dunk. I hope the editor doesn’t hate it, even if it is not accepted.
I have one other story almost ready to go out. It has a slow spot in the middle that I need to rewrite, but my boss is wandering around like Hamlet’s Ghost, so I can’t work on it. Maybe next week I can find time. If one of the two stories out is a sale, I will be encouraged to work on the nearly done story.
I released, with some stumbling, my wordpress plugin to track outbound clicks. This lets me know where people go when they leave the site. It’s like the myBlogLog, only I get to see the stats in real time for free and I can even create some more interesting reports and I will add them to the plugin when they are working correctly. It is nice to see all of my readers leaving the site when they click on ebay links.
When I first released it, I accidentally copied another plugin to the WordPress site and the first 4 people to download it got the wrong plugin. That’s all right because I think that on the first day there are mostly robots downloading the code. I don’t know why this is. I corrected the problem almost immediately.
At the same time I released the 1.2 update to my Permalinks Finder plugin (hence the confusion). I made a mistake in the permalinks finder code and had to re-release it with an enhancement that I was still debugging. Luckily it still works, but the extra enhancements aren’t described in the documentation. It is a nice fortune cookie for anyone who actually needs the extra feature.
As you can see, I am an advocate of “Agile Coding” methodology, and I always have trouble in environments where I have to go through boring ocde reviews and beta releases. I like to throw caution to the wind, let the chips fall where they may, and let sleeping cliches lie.
These updates have been in the works for weeks, but things are hectic here. I have three more plugins to release. One is the eBay store widget and another is the amazon random display widget (which by default shows the last 50 hugo award winning novels). When things settle down and people the 9th floor starts finding new jobs, I will have time to polish these up and get them out there for people to download.
I have a plugin that displays a random Beatles verse. I have a feeling though that Wordpress will kill it because it violates copyright laws.
I sold a story, “You Can’t Think About It” to Tyree Campbell at SamsDotPublishing after a 125 day wait.
I submitted my SF story ‘The Reefs of Jove” today after I read that J Erwine had only one spot left to fill in the next issue of his magazine. I was sitting on this story waiting for inspiration. It wasn’t as strong as I wanted it to be. I added a little bit of a side plot that I hoped would strengthen it, but I am not sure. The story is OK, but I wanted it to have more punch.
I have on another story out for 90+ days and I almost hope that it doesn’t sell so I can send it to Tyree. He would have gotten it in the first place, but he took too long on the last one.
I have to write another story that has been taking shape in my head, but things are tense at work.
I bought this book at a booksale at the Rhinebeck, NY library. Talbot Mundy is a cross between Robert E. Howard and H. Rider Haggard. I read a little of this book and I’ve decided it will be my next bus book. It is a little like She by Rider.
There are four pen and ink illustrations in the book by Joseph Clement Coll. I scanned them because they are interesting. I thought maybe one of them might make a good book cover since the book came out in 1918 and is long out of copyright.
I finished what one of the last pages for the new improved cthreepo.com website. I wrote this the first time around 1999 and then forgot about it. It appeared in a sloppy form on the old website.
I complete rewrote it. I moved the inflammatory “No Nazis” law down and put a politically correct law at the top. I got rid of the weaker laws and some of the casual remarks so as to tighten it up. I then listed the laws backwards starting at 10.
The website is getting over 1,000 users a day now. The new site layout and ranking have helped quite a bit. I have been “Stumbled” by stumbleupon.com on three different pages. These have been writing pages as well as science pages so I have a whole bunch of new readers.
10 Laws of Good Science Fiction | Resources for Science Fiction Writers.
I had to blog this. It is a very Golden Age of SF idea and very Heinleinesque. (Coincidentally, I started reading Heinlein’s 1942 Beyond This Horizon, this morning.) More recently, William Gibson set the whole second half of Neuromancer in a Space resort circling the earth.
It’s $4.4 million for a spot. I’ll wait until the price drops a little before I make reservations. If there is a contest, I will use the entry technique from Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit Will Travel, to make sure I win.
SPACE.com — Space Hotel Takes Reservations for 2012 Opening.
Every one here at work is depressed because of the political changes. I am guessing that it is because they don’t like the uncertainty. I keep hearing about how 15 years ago a County Executive outsourced the IT department to IBM, which turned out to be a total disaster. Another theme is that the new Executive (I have to memorize his name) will sell off Rye Playland to developers. Playland is one of the projects that keeps my group busy. We do their programming.
I haven’t heard from the 9th floor (executive territory) all day. I think everyone is using up their sick days and polishing their resumes. The lawyer types that I deal with will all have to find work after January. I can’t see them bothering much in the next couple of months. Many of my projects came from the 9th floor. I am lucky in that I have a wide variety of projects and I don’t do all that much that is political.
I have not often voted in the odd year elections, but my job, working for county government, gives me the day off so I have no excuse.
The TV is full of ads for New Jersey governor, and NYC mayor. I live in New York, but upstate, so these ads are just annoyances to me. There has been some small number of ads on the cable channels for Rockland County executive. My mom is friends with the current excutive, but I am a big fan of my Father’s voting strategy. He said that you should vote agains the incumbent. All parties are the same and all candidates are running for office to get their fingers in the public pie. The thing to do is keep anyone from getting good at getting the graft. With a new politician there will be a while where they have to learn the ropes and they will not be stealing as much.
I also wanted to vote against the only person running that I am personally acquainted with – I do not want this idiot in my government.
The blog is now PR 4. I know you could care less, so I made the main page entry on the root blog.
This is a big deal for me. It was a goal that I started working on about two months ago and all of the work has paid off.
The book blog, the bee blog and the star finder jumped from 1 to 3, which is nothing to sneeze at.
JT30 and HarpAmps are not listed, yet, but I suppose that they lost out. I am going to have to redo those soon.
Before Christmas I will have converted the Cat Blog, the Bee Blog and the Book blog to Wordpress with optimized themes. I will also take a shot at jt30 and harpamps. I have been discouraged about playing harp, but I should really start working on them.
Google Pagerank – Halloween October 2009 | Resources for Science Fiction Writers.
Stumbleupon.com on the average is sending a click every 10 seconds to the middle earth map on the main page. I know this because I wrote a Wordpress plugin that lets me watch the traffic, pretty much in real time. I should get about 1000 users today if this keeps up for very long
This is bigger than the cliche list hits, for a much crappier page. I noticed that stumbleupon is also sending hits to this blog. This is all very odd.
In other news I ran my guidelines link snatcher again and I have a new page of about 300 guidelines. I’ve added a dozen other links to the main menu. I now need a way to add those to the blog so I can generate traffic up as well as down the chain.
The Root directory here www.cthreepo.com is nearly converted to Wordpress. It has taken up my spare time here and even at home. I have the Bee Blog, the Book Reviews, and the Star Directory Pages to convert, but I am not sure how I should do this. There is version of Wordpress that handles multiple blogs and another that will create virtual blogs for each directory.
This conversion is the reason why I have not been blogging much lately. When things settle down here I will start converting my other websites. I also want to write a guide for converting from Blogger to Wordpress, since I am now an expert on it.
The one last page to convert is my 10 Laws of SF, including the No Nazis law. One reviewer said that it was so full of typos that it hurt to read it. I see no typos, but that’s me. I am going to import it to Word, rewrite chunks and let Word tell me what is wrong. I’ll reformat it and put it up as a Wordpress page, and hopefully, it won’t hurt anyone’s eyes.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that the search engines are sending much more traffic. This is due to the new templates and the use of a Search Engine Optimizer plugin and Google sitemaps. I get nearly double the traffic and it’s only been about a month since I started.
Erica and I went galavanting up to Ulster and Columbia Counties Sunday to enjoy the color of the changing leaves.
This 200 year old church had some beautiful golden yellow maples in the graveyard.
I took some pictures of a beautiful faded blue barn and outbuildings.
There was a corn field.
More colorful trees.
A blue bench overlooking the Catskills.
A kill, which is the dutch word for brook.
We had brunch at the Beekman Arm’s – the best brunch ever!
An evil looking wooden Indian in Rhinebeck, NY.
Rhinebeck had it’s children’s Halloween parade, which was very cute.
A vendor at the farmer’s market brought his bees.
Here are all 120 images:
You can link to the picasa album at http://picasaweb.google.com/kpgraham/FallFoliage10282009?feat=directlink
Full 80% of all of my hits come from Google Image Search. This should help that.
While up in Saratoga Springs for a guitar show. I was hungry. I asked a few people where was the best place to eat in town and it didn’t take long for the consensus to be obvious. I had to go to Hattie’s and get the fried chicken.
Hatties is on Phila Street and has been in operation since 1938, when the famous fried chicken recipe was invented.
Here, from their the Hattie’s Website is a picture of Hattie:
Here’s Larry in front of the place, in the rain.
Here are the two lovely ladies who made sure Larry and I had a very good time.
