Tuesday, September 07, 2004

If you’re reading this, then I have successfully updated my web site.

My new web host, at odd moments, won’t let me publish.

I try to publish repeatedly. I keep getting the following error message. “The server sent a response that FrontPage could not parse.”

I can try to publish a half to an hour later and sometimes that works.

The time I’ve spent trying to update my site eats away at the time I might be writing something you might find interesting.

And so it goes….

MY WAR - Fear And Loathing In Iraq is back!

Could Be True Department (How do you think the big energy companies are going to react?)

Cold Fusion Back From the Dead

U.S. Energy Department gives true believers a new hearing

Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy will receive a report from a panel of experts on the prospects for cold fusion—the supposed generation of thermonuclear energy using tabletop apparatus. It's an extraordinary reversal of fortune: more than a few heads turned earlier this year when James Decker, the deputy director of the DOE's Office of Science, announced that he was initiating the review of cold fusion science. Back in November 1989, it had been the department's own investigation that determined the evidence behind cold fusion was unconvincing. Clearly, something important has changed to grab the department's attention now.

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Back in the day (Commodore 64, Apple, TRS-80, original IBM PC), you could buy some nice software productivity programs for $50 to $100.

There were many small software companies that turned out decent programs.

They didn’t have a campus or thousands of programmers.

If Microsoft Office cost about $100, maybe Microsoft would sell more programs. Perhaps if a new updated version of a program actually had something new and improved to offer, people would upgrade.

Which brings us to Microsoft seeing a threat.

Microsoft Sees Open-Source Threat Looming Ever Larger

Microsoft Corp. is facing growing pressure from open-source software across every segment of its business—a competitive threat that could have significant consequences for its financial future going forward, the software maker said in its latest 10-K filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (news - web sites) this week.

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The Hugo award winners for this year are listed below. (The Hugo awards are awards for the top Sci-Fi of the year.)

Hugo Awards

Best Novel - Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

Best Novella - "The Cookie Monster" by Vernor Vinge

Best Novelette - "Legions in Time" by Michael Swanwick

Best Short Story - "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman

Best Related Book - The Chesley Awards for Science Fictiion and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective by John Grant, Elizabeth L. Humphrey, and Pamela D. Scoville

Best Professional Editor - Gardner Dozois

Best Professional Artist - Bob Eggleton

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - Gollum's Acceptance Speech at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards

Best Semi-Prozine - Locus, Charles N. Brown, Jennifer A. Hall, and Kirsten Gong-Wong, eds.

Best Fanzine - Emerald City, Cheryl Morgan, ed.

Best Fan Writer - Dave Langford

Best Fan Artist - Frank Wu

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer - Jay Lake

Hard boiled crime stories, old and new, in classic packaging

Hard Case Crime is a new paperback imprint that's reprinting old pulp crime novels and commissioning new novels in the style of the old pulps. They're publishing them in replica packaging designed to look like the old dime-novels, and they've even brought Robert McGinnis, best known for painting the original James Bond movie posters, out of retirement to do cover art.

From World War II through the 1960s, paperback crime novels were one of the fastest-selling categories in book publishing. Millions of readers snapped up hundreds of millions of books by well-known authors like Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane, as well as by promising young writers like Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain. Today, Block, Leonard, and McBain still make the bestseller lists with each new hardcover -- but the pulp novels that first captured the public's imagination weren't hardcovers. They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the last page. No one's published books like that in years.

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SF story of great note: Klages's "Green Glass Sea"

"Green Glass Sea" is about Trinity, where the first bomb was dropped, and trinitite, the faintly radioactive fused green glass from the Trinity site that can be had in small or large pieces on eBay, even to this day.

The story is a memoir of the life of the small daughter of an atomic scientist, who recounts the events leading up to and following Trinity in heartbreaking Klages style:, simple, subtle, emotionally powerful writing that will knock you on your ass again and again as you read it.

Now "Green Glass Sea" is on Strange Horizons, the excellent online sf magazine, and free for all to read. If you haven't read Klages before, you're in for a treat.

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