Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

I don’t know how many times I’ve told my kids to be careful with knives, and certainly I know better. So what do I do when trying to remove a pressed-in fitting from the end of a hose? Try to cut the hose with my Swiss army knife, is what, holding things at exactly the wrong angle. Of course, the knife slipped.

Fortunately I manged to “only” impale/slice the index finger of my left hand, over the first joint. I think my fingerbone stopped the blade from going any deeper. It was bleeding quite a bit, so I went to the doctor’s office. It wasn’t until they started testing how well I could straighten my finger against a force that the more subtle implications sunk in; I could have severed the tendon that runs up the back of the finger to extend it — and I’d be re-learning how to type about now. As it was they put four stitches in it to keep the wound closed. That made a great graphic lesson for my kids: “see what happens if you’re not careful when using a knife.”

And I think I’ll leave the bloodstain on the tip of the knifeblade as a reminder to me not to be so stupid.

Okay, here it is, the new content management system for this website. You can now post comments to individual postings. No self-registration yet, but that’s coming soon, I want to see how this server stands up to the load first.

Not quite all the content from the old site is transferred yet but it should be within the next couple of days. I also want to do a bit of fine tuning to the page layout and maybe shift a few things to static pages.

Comments welcome, let me know what you think.

The 40th annual Denver regional SF/F/etc con, MileHiCon, is coming up next weekend, and it promises to be a blast. I’m scheduled for three panels: “The Bartender’s Guide to the Galaxy” (I once worked as a bartender, I’ve invented a couple of exotic drinks in my stories — remember, when making a Nervous Nellie, add the liquid nitrogen last — and off the top of my head I can think of at least three or four SF short story series set in bars or taverns); “Terraforming the Earth” (I’m more interested in terraforming other planets, and the global warming folks think we’re Venus-forming the Earth); and “Exploration Space Architecture Study” (near-term plans for exploring the inner solar system).

There’ll be the usual mix of gaming, videos, art show, dealers’ room, costumes and panels covering topics of interest to aspring writers to author readings to the legendary Friday night pajama panel, and of course the original Critter Crunch on Sunday.

The Worldcon has wound down, it was a blast, and it’s all over but for the dead dog parties. Actually that’s not quite true, the con commitee still has work ahead of them (paperwork and such) which is really tough to be motivated to do once the parties are over, and they have my sympathy and respect. (My wife once chaired an International Space Development Conference; I helped edit the proceedings.)

The Hugo Awards went well (you can find the full list elsewhere, off the top of my head: Dr. Who Blink for best dramatic, short form; Stardust, long form; Connie Willis won (yet another) Hugo for her novella “All Seated on the Ground”, and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won best novel).

The annual World Science Fiction Convention, this year in Denver (hence, Denvention 3, Denver’s 3rd Worldcon), is kicking off the day after tomorrow. This isn’t my first, but it is my first in too many years. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve located better hardware to host the overhauled website on. Now I just need to upgrade the hard drive and install the software. Real Soon Now.

Works in progress

Two of my T-Space stories, “Into the Fire” and “Renee” (both Jason Curtis stories) are getting well recieved at the JBU slush forum. Well, the latter has mixed reviews on a plot element — no complaints about the writing, per se, just some people think Renee is a jerk. Since that’s not what I intended I need to revisit that. “Into the Fire”, though, looks like it just needs a couple of nitpicks fixed. There are also a couple of my stories out sitting in the slushpiles of the paper magazine publishers; I don’t expect to hear anything soon.

Sorry I haven’t added much content lately, I’ve been swamped at work, with seventeen new servers to install and configure. Meanwhile I’ve been playing with WordPress and have come to the conclusion that to do it right, I’m going to need a bigger server. So make that eighteen new servers. Sigh.

Well, that was interesting. A few days ago I took off the “turing test” from my comments page — it’s something a lot of websites have to filter out automated spambots without requiring everyone to register. I removed it to see if it was the reason for the low volume of comments I’ve received to date (although I suspected it was just the newness of the site, hardly anyone has heard of it yet, and there’s not a lot of content here yet.) Well, I did get a lot more comments — all of them spam. Everything from just one-line URLs to huge lists of non-sequitor phrases. Sigh.
I’ve put the test back in a somewhat simpler form. Meanwhile I’m looking at WordPress and some other blogsite software, which already has mechanisms for this (including registration, etc) built-in.

The Chocolate Fusion essay is up. Well, more a piece of flash fiction with a couple of paragraphs of context.

Visitors can now post feedback to this site here[link removed], or use the “Post Comment” link in the header. I don’t have the site yet set up to automatically post those comments back to a public page — I’m working on that — but they are logged and I’ll read them. I’m looking into software (possibly WordPress) to automate all this, please bear with me in the meantime. Thanks.

[Update: Since the site is now on different software, this post is obsolete. It’s even easier to post feedback, just hit that clicky beneath each post.]