Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

I’m back from MileHiCon. It was a lot of fun, I met a lot of old friends and made some new ones, and was on several panels. I’m exhausted.

However, I did want to point out the new T-Space page that’s up, giving a bit more detail of the background of the T-Space series of stories (the Jason Curtis stories, The Venaticorum Archive, and others in progress). As time goes on I’ll be adding more here, both for those of you who are interested and to help keep my notes on the place organized 😉 I don’t have comments turned on for that page yet, but feel to leave comments to this post.

I finally figured out how to do hierarchical pages (pages that link to other pages rather than posts, there are important differences in how they’re handled by this software), and the rest of the essays from the old site are now up. There’s still a little bit of content from the old place to move over, but the end is in sight. It helps to know what you’re doing.

Most of the dates on the old essays are wrong, they’re dated as of when I loaded them into the new system. I may go back and change that at some point.

Note: Because in some cases I cut’n’pasted HTML from the old site, there may be some broken links. I’ve fixed all the ones I’ve found so far, but I may well have missed some. Please report broken links using the comment mechanism. Thanks.

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.