Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

It seems Register.Com took too long to sort out the issue with my domain name, and let some cybersquatter jump on it. Said squatter wants over $1000 for it. Ain’t going to happen. Since what they did is contrary to the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (nobody on the planet, but me, has any use for the ‘alastairmayer.com’ domain), I can get it back. I’m even willing to pay a lawyer if I have to (“millions for defense, not a penny for tribute”). But all that takes time and hassle, so it won’t be in the immediate future. Grrr.

Meanwhile, I’m changing all the on-line references I can find to this one, alastairmayer.org.

If you’re reading this, then you’ve followed a working link or otherwise found out that the site is now at www.alastairmayer.org, not at www.alastairmayer.com.

Through a combination of unfortunate events, some my own stupid fault, some my original domain registrar’s, my domain “alastairmayer.com” expired and I didn’t find out about that until renewal became problematic. (It’s complicated; somehow I managed to end up paying twice for renewal and still not getting it renewed. We’re still working on sorting that out.)

Anyway, I bought “alastairmayer.org” (and a couple of others) from a different registrar, and moved what I could of the site here. I’ll sync back up when I get the domain issue resolved. Meanwhile I need to recover some of the recent posts…I don’t have immediate access to the latest backup (that also is being worked out).

“Sorry about this little snag, fellows.”

The 44th annual MileHiCon, Denver and the Front Range’s regional sf/f convention, starts today at the usual location: the Hyatt-Regency Tech Center in south east Denver.

I’ll be on a couple of panels and readings:
– “Long-Lasting Short Story” at 4:00pm today (Friday)
– “Higgs-Boson & Faster Than Light Neutrinos” at 3:00pm Saturday
– Reading at 5:00pm Saturday.

The usual locals — Connie Willis, Carrie Vaughn, Mario Acevedo, Jeanne Stein, Paolo Bacigalupi, among others (sorry guys, I’d love to mention you all but MileHiCon has its own web site for that) — will be there, along with guests Steve Brust and Cherie Priest. Come on by!

So, on this day 2055 years ago (give or take a few days for calendar reform) Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by a bunch of senators (politics was more hands-on in those days) to prevent the Republic from turning into a dictator-led Empire. That worked well. Of somewhat more relevance, the Ides of March was a festival day for Mars, although for the god, not the planet.

Me, I’m in the middle of a major crunch in the day job, counting down to the cutover to a major reimplementation of our business software in a couple of weeks. By day (and sometimes night) I’m a senior analyst/developer for a major provider of satellite-delivered entertainment. This cutover is as complex as any satellite launch, except that we do that every year or two.

Which is by way of explaining my absence here lately, and for the next few weeks to come. (And by the time the dust has settled, it’ll be tax time. Oh joy.) More sometime in April, unless something exciting happens in the meantime.

Cheers.

I’ll be in Colorado Springs, at the Crowne Plaza hotel, for this year’s COSine Science Fiction Convention. I’m not scheduled for any panels but I’ll be around at least for Saturday. It’s a small but fun con.

Who Else! Books will have a presence in the dealers’ room at the con, and they’ll have copies of my The Chara Talisman for sale — as well as a wide variety of other books, particularly by Colorado authors. On a related note, on Saturday, February 11, Who Else! is hosting a multi-author book signing at their Broadway Book Mall location (200 S. Broadway, Denver), and I’ll be there to sign copies of Chara or anything else someone wants me to sign. Well, excepting maybe blank checks.

It’s Veterans Day here in the US, Remembrance Day in Canada, the UK, and other commonwealth countries. Sometimes called Poppy Day, after the traditional symbol named from the poem “In Flander’s Fields” (where poppies grow…)

I have a book coming out today too — but that will keep.

To all veterans of the US, Canada, the UK and allied countries … thank you.

Another MileHiCon — the Denver area’s annual SF convention — is underway. I have a full schedule this year, with four panels (FTL, collaborations, writing humor, and space mining), a reading — I share the slot with Kevin J. Anderson, which pretty much guarantees me an audience 😉 — an autographing — sharing the table with Vernor Vinge, so there’ll be a long line for one of us — and an interview for the Machine Readable podcast.

It promises to be a lot of fun, as always, and I get to announce the imminent release (on 11/11/11) of my novel The Chara Talisman, which I may have mentioned here once or twice already.

Hope to see you there.

(BTW, the astute among you may have noticed a gap here since the pre-Worldcon post. Mea culpa. There was plenty happening — Worldcon, Bubonicon, the report of possible FTL neutrinos, and more — and I took notes. But I didn’t immediately turn said notes into postings here, and a bunch of the other stuff happening (of lesser interest to anyone not me) got in the way. Some of those notes, particular on the possible superluminal neutrino observations, will make it here soon. Or perhaps I can figure a way to use superluminal neutrinos to post them a month ago. Cheers.)

I’m frantically packing and otherwise getting ready to leave for Renovation, the 69th annual WorldCon in Reno. I’m behind schedule in just about everything else because of a whole bunch of other crap stuff going on in my life, but this weekend is for forgetting all that, meeting old friends, new friends, fans, fellow writers, editors, and generally having a good time. I fly out right after work tomorrow, and I’m taking the train (the California Zephyr) back — I haven’t taken a good long train ride in years.

I hope to see those of you who are attending, stop me and say ‘hi’. I’ll likely be wearing an aloha shirt, and my hair’s a lot shorter than Ed Bryant’s. 😉

I finally bought myself a real Kindle. I’ve been using Kindle-for-PC software on my laptop for about a year, but the actual device is much more portable. Also, I want to be able to see how my e-books and e-stories look on the actual device. (I’ll get a Nook, too, at some point. Meanwhile there’s a Nook reader for PC.)

How do I like it so far? Great, with some reservations. I bought the wi-fi only model, because (a) I’m cheap (the Kindle 3 with built-in G3 wireless access is $50 extra) and (b) having truly instant access to Amazon’s Kindle store is a little too tempting for me. (But not for you; of course you want instant access to buy any (all) of my e-books). Public wi-fi access isn’t quite as ubiquitous as one might hope, but then I don’t really need to be download while driving. Most coffee shops and fast-food places have wi-fi these days, so it isn’t really a problem. The included web browser (in the latest software) takes some getting used to — a gray-scale image, and no mouse or touchscreen means you have to move the cursor around with the “5-way” pointer key — but I could easily read my favorite blog sites.

The built-in text-to-speech software can read your e-books to you, if the publisher has activated that feature (I do with all of my books/stories). It sounds rather robotic, and occasionally messes up pronunciation, but it’s great, especially for non-fiction where dramatic reading and voice inflection isn’t so important. However, it doesn’t handle section headings or bullet-lists well. If the heading or list item doesn’t have a comma or period at the end, the Kindle software just keeps reading without taking a virtual breath, which can be a bit disconcerting.

These pronunciation issues are probably easily fixed with some tweaks to the text-to-speech algorithms. On the other hand, Amazon earlier had a dispute authors and publishers who (with some justification) claimed that this infringed on the audio performance rights. The current state seems a happy medium between providing for the visually impaired (as does the Kindle’s adjustable font size) and the improved quality of performance that a human reader could provide. (Amazon also provides for publishers to opt in or out of enabling text-to-speech when the Kindle version is prepared.)

For the tinkerers among you, the Kindle is easily “rooted”. Dropping the right files into the Kindle when it’s attached to a computer (via its USB cable) will update the OS to allow access to the Linux-based operating system using that same USB cable as a network connection. Mind, if you don’t know what you’re doing you could really mess up your reader that way. Details can be found at www.mobileread.com and looking for “usbnetwork” and “jailbreak”. Consider those vague instructions as the equivalent of a childproof-cap; if you can’t find it from that, you probably shouldn’t be messing with trying to root your Kindle. 😉

I’ll always have a soft spot for paper copies of books, but I find I’m using my Kindle more and more.

It has been a crazy two weeks since my last post. When I posted that I had just gotten over what was “probably flu”, several days of fever and sleeping 20 hours a day. I had tax paperwork to catch up on and a couple of job interviews scheduled for the following week. So what happens Monday? I start the uncontrollable shivering and rapid temperature rise that began my earlier round of ‘flu. I was not happy, for multiple reasons.

As my temperature hit 104F my doctor directed me to the hospital emergency room, where they started pumping me full of fluids and ran a CT scan of my lungs. The (again, somewhat uncertain) diagnosis was pneumonia, with some other test results that were just odd enough that they wanted to keep an eye on me, so they checked me in for observation. So much for the job interview Tuesday, and — since they kept me in two nights — the other one on Wednesday. Fortunately both parties were understanding about rescheduling. Of course by Tuesday morning (thanks to IV fluids and antibiotics) I felt fine, but they didn’t want to send me home just then.

As it turned out, Tuesday’s interview — rescheduled to Thursday — went just fine. So well, in fact, that they called me late that afternoon with an offer and wanting me to start the following Monday.
This past week, then, has been my first week on the new job (Unix/Linux systems admin). Of course it’s hurry up and wait — I had to go through mandatory security training (again – we had to do it annually at H-P), fill out the usual ton of paperwork that goes with a new job, and wait for my background check to clear before they could give me access to the systems. All of which took most of the week. On top of all that, it was a busy extracurricular week for the kids: orchestra concert, high school sneak peak (Arthur and Robert start next year), school book fair, karate, and Girl Scouts. So here it is, two weeks later.

There’s been some interesting stuff happening. A couple of physicists show that wormholes could connect pairs of stars (I’m reminded of Pournelle’s “tramlines”), the Indian lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 has discovered a mile-long lava tube cave on the Moon, and I got a nice non-rejection for a story that may yet turn into a sale.

But more about that in a few days. In the meantime a reader has made some excellent suggestions for additions to this site, which I need to get working on.