Concrete traffic barricades come standard in 6′ or 12′ lengths, which is a problem when you need them less than 5′ in any direction, and still weighing at least 3000#. This is the sort of thing I do at work. Tomorrow, I’m in a harness, in a swingstage, changing lightbulbs in a scoreboard.
There are hundreds of different grades of cement and concrete, including a variety that floats. Engineering students make canoes out of this stuff and race them.
Yes they do:
There also exists about a hundred different grades of paper, and keeping track of those is a job skill unto itself. Owning a printer doesn;t make you a publisher.
Writing a book, though, makes you a marketer – and paper is only one format. More on that in Writing Made Visible
(updated after some neglect.)
And Fossil Springs Road is closed for the summer. More on that in Are We Lost Yet?
What follows is mostly for my reference, though you are welcome to read it, of course.
They say the first step to meeting goals is to write them down. In an ideal world, I’d have 200-500 words of blogging every night. This would do a few things:
q More blogs = more exposure. Regular blogs have higher readership.
q Cross referencing = cross marketing.
q Writing regular blogs makes you better at … writing blogs.
So I’m going to start doing that. There. I wrote it down, thus doubling my chance of success (from 7% to 14%!)
I’m not proposing this is the key to success and happiness here. In the final accounting a blog is still just a blog – somewhere between a newspaper column and a diary entry. There’s a limit to the audience interested in the details of my life and how that colors my perceptions.
This is the schedule I have in my head:
Monday: Fiction marketing or WHWL. There may come a day – ideally by the end of the year, when there is a blog or two relevant to my published fiction. Right now I have no product ready to go – so this day is still open.
Tuesday: Non-fiction proposal day. That means query letters – so on that day my regular readers can take a break.
I have started a web comic. ‘ll explain why later – perhaps.
It’s about a silly penguin with a magic hat – though it has no actual story line. sillypenguin.com
I don’t apologize for long droughts of posts. If you don’t like it, here’s yer money back.
Due to the lock-out shortened-no camp-compressed nature of this NBA season*, we could see a record in 20+ point victories per game played. While that’s better than no basketball,t should not be confused with good basketball.
*It’s not a real season.
Don’t spend money when you’re drunk. What I’mabout to describe are not bad decisions, but I still kinda wish I was sober.
I’m going to Darkcon - which is the pirate/party con of the now 4 major Spec Fic cons in the Valley. And the one I would normally be least tempted to spend money on. But we were at a party at CopperCon, and a bit drunk, and I had cash in my pocket and I got a really good rate – but yeah. We shall see. Spent the money. I’m going.
I also own the domain sillypenguin.com. Don’t bother checking it out today – there’s just a GoDaddy placeholder. My wife wants to make and sell custom greeting cards. I’ve fancied the notion of doing a webcomic of some sort, just to force myself to get back into drawing.So the Plan is to post comics about a silly penguin as a lead in to the greeting card page.
Silly Penguin was a whim. I searched the term and saw that ti was open. I was a few beers down and didn’t want this “unique domain opportunity” to be lost. As if random gibberish is somehow challenging for me to come up with.
Now we need a webhost. My front-runner is Fat Cow, but I’m open to input if any of my IT buddies has a strong opinion.
And I signed up for Code Year - because I’m tired of having no clue about things that are becoming more and more important to my work.
“Neuroscience is still unable to provide a clear and direct explanation as to how the microcircuitry of the brain actually functions,” says Hugo De Garis, a cognitive science professor and director of the Artificial Brain Lab at Xiamen University in China. “We know that the basic circuitry is the same all over the human cortex, but just how the circuitry works is still largely unknown.”
One main sticking point for AI research is the idea of consciousness or emotion—vague concepts that aren’t easily quantifiable or scientifically proven but are essential for creating a supermachine because, many scientists claim, feelings are integral to handling our thoughts.
Coincidentally, among the four books I’m currently reading is The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama. Within, DL asserts that western sience will never satisfactorily explain how consciousness works because objective measurements miss what is an inherently and unavoidably subjective experience. He argues that we must also consider the “rigorous, focused and disciplined use of introspection and mindfulness to probe deeply into the nature of a chosen subject.”
To put it another way, although the experience of happiness may coincide with certain chemical reactions in the brain, such as an increase in serotonin, no amount of biochemical and neurobiological description of this brain change can explain what happiness is.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.
Sure its been a while. I have learned many things, some newsworthy. But ‘m not going to attempt to summarize them now. (Although the vermin situation is under control – finally).
Instead, as happens from time to time, I’m going to post some links about the antics of the octopi.
First – not really an octopus, but close enough: The Flamboyant cuttlefish:
Next, water can’t contain this octopus. He/she/it climbs out to mingle with the tourists.
I suspect the true purpose of the octopus was to evict the crab.
My dogs have ticks and my kids have lice and the internet isn’t much help.
On ticks, I’ve learned that anything you buy at the pet store for less than a month’s salary is fairly useless. We have not found a spray for less than $30/bottle that does not leave me pulling at least 6 ticks off the lab every time I pet him. The $40 stuff is coming – but its gotta wait for payday. (The healer, OTH, has been more effective at removing the ticks herself. I only find them in places she cannot reach.)
Ticks don’t live on dogs, they latch on to feed, hide and grow, feed again, and then lay 10,000 eggs. You’ll never find them in all the tiny cracks they can hide in, but cleaning the house front to back seems to help. They all have to come to the dogs, however, and that is where I have concentrated my surveillance.
Brown dog ticks, which is what we have (I think), don’t feed on humans. They’ll bite though. At least a hundred have gone down my toilet.
I’d link to a website here, but let me save the time: Remove them carefully, buy some products, ask your vet.
The internet is similarly obvious about head lice: Remove them carefully, buy some products, ask your doctor. And wash everything with hot water.
This is what we’ve learned from other parents: If you put a pillow or stuffed animal in a garbage bag and leave it out in the summer sun for two days, that kills everything. Mayonnaise is just as effective a hair lubricant as conditioner, and a ton cheaper. What’s going to do the most good is removing the lice and eggs with a fine-toothed comb. We own the one that came with the lice shampoo, but flea combs (for pets) will also work well. Boil it all (combs, brushes, hair clips) afterwards. OTC shampoos and treatments are hit-or-miss. Some strains of lice are just resistant. The comb is a sure, if labor intensive, thing. The spray is for the bedding – don’t use it on the kids.
The lice I think we’ve beaten back. The tick wars go on.
A segway into politics seems too easy. Let’s just do some links.
Steven Pinker, writing in the Wall Street Journal explains that – despite the news – we are actually becoming more tolerant and less violent as a species.
“Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species. “
What I found was unsettling. They might not know it yet, but some of the most educated workers in the nation are engaged in a fierce battle with machines. As computers get better at processing and understanding language and at approximating human problem-solving skills, they’re putting a number of professions in peril. Those at risk include doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, scientists, and creative professionals—even writers like myself.
The discovery of this planet isn’t monumental, (see last post for more on this process) but the artwork is cool:
NASA has a new on-line tool to explore planets in our own system. The LA times describes it here.
“You are now free to move about the solar system,” Blaine Baggett, a manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, said in a statement. “See what NASA’s spacecraft see — and where they are right now — all without leaving your computer.”
Here ends the respectable portion of this blog entry.
So, according to the WordPress dashboard, one of the top searches leading to this site is “unicorn pooping marshmallows” which leads you to thi
That post also has one of the few clean photos of yours truly on this blog, and a video explaining the importance of the First Follower.
This post features something equally classy:
That is a Lady J - a portable urinal for women. That’s right, we span the globe to find weird urinals all over the world – even in your over-sized purse. Franly, I’m kinda disappointed the device isn’t pink.
If you follow the D-backs or the Mercury, playing hard all the way through the game can get you a LOT farther than any of the talking heads would have expected.
Small cons are great – because you can actually talk to people!
Buy some light groceries and keep them in the hotel room.
The art carries the story in a comic book (or graphic novel, or any variant). Words only get what little space is left over, so every word has to count. No small talk.
There is no standard for comic book scripts. Unless you’re writing for Dark Horse Comics. Their format is here.
Marketing (or anything else) via social media – a few rules:
1) Be social first! Pitch your crap second. The other way around just gets you deleted.
2) If you’re not comfortable with the format, don’t use it. You’ll likely suck at it anyway.
3) If you’re marketing yourself as a writer – write well. Spells words correctly.
4) No amount of social media presence will make up for a shoddy product.
The current estimate is that half of all star systems have planets, and the average may be 1-10 planets per star.
We find an awful lot of “Hot Jupiters” – gas giants closely orbiting a star – which goes against our model of how solar systems form. We know why we keep finding them – they are relatively easy to spot. We have no idea why they would exist at all.
Planets orbiting pulsars are very easy to find, even as small as the Earth. But the pulsar’s radiation makes life pretty much impossible.
Piratey sword-fighting was all about shorter movements with shorter swords (crowded ships and all). And footwork – you live or die by footwork.
I’m over adapting anything to D20. It’s no longer supported for 3.5, and I have no urge to learn 4.0. I’m pushing forward with the game. Amen.
I’m thinking about writing it in Tiddlywiki. Seriously.
I have watched my wife get a C-section, and I have watched blow-out Little League games, and those experiences were horrible. Not quite as bad, but ranking up there, is watching (because my kids seized control of the TV) a re-run of a Saturday Night Live Christmas Special in late August.
Modern CPR is now 30 compressions / 2 breaths. And the best place to restock your first aid kit is your local dollar store.
I’m 44, a father, homeowner and profession at several things. There aren’t many excuses for me. If I’m going to turn a profit writing, blogging is part of the process. So, this blog update over the weekend. Are We Lost Yet? updates on Wednesday. Writing Made Visible updates on Thursday (likely with writer’s group notes. Once I get in the habit of those blogs, I may add others. If you don’t want to hunt those downs, I will always announce updates here. (Because this version of WordPress automatically posts to Facebook and the like – unlike Trekalongs’.)
On that subject, Windows Movie Maker doesn’t default save to a format You Tube can use. You have to save it as a movie, and not a project. How do I know? I have a You Tube Channel: Are We Lost Yet?
