Fantasist's Scroll

While not exactlly a fantasy or science-fiction writer, he was still one of the great ones.  Famous for his Mike Hammer books and his rough-and-tumble pose style, Spillane was one of the more successful writers of his day.  And, according to his obituary on MSN, that’s how he thought of himself, as a writer who sold his work.  It was a job to him, a way to make money, not high art.  I can respect that attitude.  Get it written and get it sold.  Interestingly enough, Spillane got his fiction-writing start in comics writing for Batman and Superman, but then World War II broke out and his plans changed.  After the war, he turned to full-length fiction to earn money.

Mickey Spillane died yesterday, Monday, July 17th, at the age of 88.  He was married three times and the father of four children.

I mentioned this on my other blog, but not here yet.  I’ve recently upgraded my blogs to the latest version of WordPress. Now, no one has probably noticed that, but I thought it was noteworthy. Well, if I did the upgrade right, no one noticed. Certainly, no one said anything if they did notice.

Mostly, it was a Very Good Thing to have upgraded, but there are some differences that still throw me off a bit. First, there’s the whole new interface deal. It used to be that I had to deal with a pretty simple, text-only interface. Now, though, the whole thing has gone all WYSIWYG and it’s totally throwing me off. Especially because it edits HTML natively. I’m getting used to it, but, still, I have to remember little details like not just hitting “enter” when I want a new line instead of a whole new section/paragraph. Secondly, the tools have really been improved. Linking and formating and everything else have been upgraded to match that slick new WYSIWYG interface, but they’ve added some HTML tools that they didn’t have before. Or, if they had them, didn’t showcase very well. Also improved is the preview section. Now, instead of just showing me a preview of the code in the post itself, WordPress previews the post as it would appear on the blog, with headers and footers and everything.
The one thing, so far, that I don’t like is the way the new version updates the timestamp on the post. For the most part, it doesn’t. Once you save a post as a draft, it takes a timestamp and seems to hold that until you manually change it. Other than that, though, I really adore the new version.

So, now you know. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

Anyway, one of the reasons for the upgrade was because I was developing plugins for WordPress. I showed you one a couple of weeks ago, and now, you can get to other one from my other blog. Moonie, the name of the plugin, is a little dodad that let’s you add the neat moonphase stuff to your WordPress blog. Now, after admiring it on my blog, you can have it for yourself. Enjoy!

Oh, wow, I could have used this in college!
Normally, I talk about whisky, as that’s my preferred drink, but this week, I’m thinking about beer. Or, something rather like it. You see, some genius at Nestle has invented, and patented, coffee-based beer. Ah, the joy of beer with caffeine and a hint of coffee taste. According to the article, the drink “pours and foams like beer, but smells of strong coffee and packs a concentrated caffeine kick.” So, you can get that double buzz from both the suds and the juice, as it were. A little “hair of the dog that bit you“. Wowzer, I could have used this the morning after a buddy and I split five pitchers of beer between the two of us, in just under four hours. Lord, I get woozy just thinking about that one.
Say, I wonder how this beer-coffee goes with cold pizza?

Better questions.
That’s the answer I give to people who ask why I know things they don’t. I ask better questions than they do. In fact, I think people often find it frustrating that I ask some of the questions I do. Things like, “So, if it doesn’t work, why do you keep doing it?”, or “Yeah, but why have you always done it that way?”. But, there’s always someone who asks better questions than I do. Take for instance the folks at the World Question Center. Now, if you really want to get your mind all bent out of shape, go read some of these questions. Then, think about what they mean. Really. Think about it.
(And, yes, this first appeared on my other blog. It’s Friday and I’m not even in town, so cut me some slack!)

Then go have a drink. It is, after all, Friday!
(And, yes, this originally appeared on my other blog.)

No, for a change, that’s not a metaphor.
According to The Scotsman.com, appropriately, someone is working on a “warp” drive. A physicist at the Applied Sciences University in Salzgitter, Germany, and a former chief of aerodynamics at the European Space Agency, Professor Jochem Hauser, who’s one of the scientists putting forth the idea, warned that they’re in the very early stages of this project, but indicated that an propulsion system based on ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s is possible. The drive would work by creating an intense magnetic field that, in theory, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.
That is the catch, though. It’s all theory. Now, there is a somewhat mysterious “Z Machine” that was created by the US Department of Energy that could generate the kind of magnetic fields required to drive the engine, so it is possible that some very interesting tests might be run in the near future. Apparently, NASA and the US Airforce took notice of this work after Prof Hauser and an Austrian colleague, Walter Droscher, wrote a paper called “Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim’s quantum theory”.
Now, all they need to do is get a Scot on their maintenance crew and they’ll be all set.

Today is William Gibson’s Birthday!

For those of you who have been hiding under a rock, or have been freshly cloned, William Gibson is the primary progenitor of the cyberpunk movement. He’s generally credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and popularizing a somewhat more realistic, if somewhat bleak, view of the future.
He also ran away to Canada in 1968 to avoid the draft. Which is the only bad thing I can say about him. I otherwise admire his work and thought processes. Certainly his literature is beyond compare. I admire his work very much and occasionally will reread some of his short stories, just to capture the feel of his prose.

Anyway, celebrate his birthday with a little science-fiction in thanks for what he’s done for the genre.

Just thought I should throw out a little note about why things have been so quiet here.
First, there’s my other blog, Diary of a Network Geek. That bad boy sucks up a lot of my time. Then, there’s work. Yes, they actually expect me to work and produce results! Can you imagine!? Then, there’s the fact that I’m single again. Yeah, being single takes up a lot of time, especially when you’re trying to NOT be single. And, I’m gaining ground there, too. 🙂
Then, too, are my list of New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve been working on them pretty steadily. Notice what number Twelve is? Yeah, write more. Specifically, write more for publication. So, while trying to get that going, along with the rest of my life, this blog tends to languish. Still, I do intend to maintain a Friday Fun Link every Friday. We’ll see how long that lasts…
Anyway, now you know!

It’s the birthday of one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century, Isaac Asimov, who was born in Petrovichi, Russia in 1920. He came with his family to the United States when he was three years old and his parents opened a candy shop in Brooklyn. Issac grew up to become a professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of medicine and in 1950 he published his first novel Pebble in the Sky.

About the same time Asimov took part in writing a textbook for medical students and he found that he loved explaining complicated things in ordinary language, and so he set out to write about science for the general public, in language they would understand. He said, “Little by little my science writing swallowed up the rest of me.”
Asimov developed a regimen of working ten hours a day, seven days a week, producing between two and five thousand words a day. Asimov’s method was to write a book about any subject that interested him but which he didn’t fully understand. He used writing as a way of teaching himself about everything.
By 1970 Asimov had written more than a hundred books and he began branching out into areas other than science. He wrote about nuclear physics and organic chemistry, history, Greek mythology, astronomy, religion, in addition to his collections of limericks, mystery novels, autobiography and science fiction. By the time of his death in 1992 he had published more than 400 books.