2 Jul 2007

On the Road Again (Not)

posted in: personal news | 0

Well, when I didn’t get a blog entry written before we left on our trip, I figured that was it for a week, anyway. I didn’t expect to have internet access, because we were to be camping for the first four nights and riding roller coasters at Cedar Point. That was the plan.

On Saturday morning, we hit the highway from Boston, bound for Ohio and relatives and Cedar Point and a book signing (July 4, 3 – 6 p.m., Kalihari Resort, Sandusky, Ohio). I’d gone to great pains to get the car and ancient camping trailer in shape, and it was all paying off. The trailer lights worked, the young nephew and niece had arrived to swell our numbers to 6, and we got off only a few hours late. The weather was mild, temperate, we took it easy, and we made it over the transmission-killing 7-mile hill on the Mass Turnpike. It was all going well. Until we got to Rochester, NY.

That’s where we exited the NY Thruway, headed for a campground and a detour to Niagara Falls in the morning. Unfortunately, the exit road from the Thruway had a big fissure which we hit—BAM! I gulped, and then the roar came. Suddenly our car sounded like a Mack truck with a bad muffler. Something had broken in the exhaust system. On a Saturday evening.

We limped along until we found a Pep Boys auto repair center, which had just closed. But the sign said it would open Sunday morning, so we rumbled on a little further, found a hotel, and hunkered down for the night. This morning, I got the news: a broken exhaust crossover pipe, and no replacement available on Sunday. And so, instead of setting up camp at Cedar Point tonight, we’re holed up at a Holiday Inn in Rochester, praying that the part can be found tomorrow morning. We’re on a very tight schedule, planned to the day, so every day we lose at this end is gone from the trip. If you don’t hear from me in the next few days, that probably will mean we got back on our way. So everyone—I hope you don’t hear from me in a few days!

Stay tuned!

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

27 Jun 2007

Grabber

posted in: personal news, quirky | 0

Okay, this is kind of silly, but I’m going to write about it anyway. It’s the tale of Grabber and his journey home to us from the Panasonic repair center. Grabber is our DVR/DVD-recorder, and our most beloved piece of electronics. Unfortunately, Grabber has been having problems with its TV Guide functions, and has spent a lot of time in the shop the last month and a half. It’s now on its way back to us, and I’ve been following its progress via UPS online tracking. It’s been quite a journey, from Palatine, Illinois, to Indianapolis, to Louisville, to Manchester NH, and then on to (back to?) Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Hello? Didn’t we just pass Boston? The tracking still says it’s on time for delivery tomorrow, though.

What made it more interesting was a book I just finished reading, Uncommon Carriers, by John McPhee. Great book. It’s about what it’s like to drive an 18-wheeler, or pilot a ship at a ship pilot’s school in Europe, or drive a coal train, or…get packages sorted at the enormous UPS Louisville facility, located, according to McPhee, between two runways at the Louisville airport. His description made it sound like something out of Monsters, Inc.—an enormous building with incomprehensible mazes of conveyor belts, and packages zipping and zorting this way and that, all under computer control. At the time I checked the UPS progress report, Grabber was in fact at that place, riding a conveyor from somewhere to somewhere. It was quite the vicarious ride.

We’ll see if Grabber arrives tomorrow, and if so, whether all has been made well.

“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order that is not yet understood.” —Henry Miller

27 Jun 2007

The Home Front

posted in: personal news | 0

It’s been an incredibly busy week or two—mainly from changes in and around the house, and preparations for our vacation trip next week. One thing that generated a lot of work was the purchase, second hand, of a huge, glass-fronted bookcase/cabinet for our dining room. It’s a little beat-up, but a very nice, solidly made old piece of furniture. It’s way too big to come up the front stairs (we live on the second and third floor of a 2-family), so it had to be winched up over the second floor porch. The quotes from movers were astronomical, so we bought a block-and-tackle set, and with much muddling around, managed to put a beam up to attach the pulleys to, and hoisted the thing and got it into the house. (Have you ever tried to keep the lines from tangling on a 7X mechanical advantage block-and-tackle? Ai caramba.) Then we started trying to fit in everything that had been on the previous shelves, including the stereo components. Ho ho ho. Here’s what it looks like, complete with the Viper pilot’s helmet (more on that later):


That was just a warm-up for getting the camping trailer ready for our trip to Ohio. The trailer’s been in the garage for about 5 years, unused. (It’s over 35 years old, a hand-me-down from my aunt and uncle, still quite handy, but getting a little long in the tooth in certain areas.) It took me three days to get the taillights working, and that was just the starting point. But we’re getting close to departure now.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, a neighbor put a Honda moped up for sale, and my wife fell in love with it. (I sort of did, too, after I rode it.) So we bought it, mostly for her to commute to work on (90 MPG or so), and I get to ride it for mental health spins after she gets home. Thus, the Viper pilot’s helmet. It’s fun! (Not as good as flying, but still.) We’ve had a lot of debate over what to name it, but Dragonbreath seems to be winning the day.

This entry is already too long, so I’m going to skip over the part about our argument with a neighbor over a 2-second dog fight, and the part about my daughter’s truncated trip to Puerto Rico, and the battle of the migraines.

“I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.” —Anonymous English Professor, Ohio University

15 Jun 2007

More Flying Stories

posted in: Flying, quirky, technology | 0

I love flying stories, don’t you? Not a day goes by that I don’t think about how much I’d like to get back to flying, if only I had the time and the money. Well, someday. Meanwhile, though, here are a couple of items that crossed my path recently.

Remember those personal flyers that populated science fiction for decades, and seemed inevitable that we would all own? George Jetson had one, why not us, right? Well, NASA is sponsoring research on it. Here’s a glimpse of our future Personal Air Vehicles.


Those personal aircraft, of course, will be very sedate and safe. (Heh-heh, we hope.) Here are a few videos and image collections of flying experiences that are anything but:

  • Video of an amazing landing of an F-15 in what any sane person would call an unflyable condition. Note: you need to get past the first couple of minutes before it really gets interesting at the end. Do watch it to the end. (Are we sure it wasn’t Starbuck flying this thing?)
  • Photos of planes landing at the old Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong
  • A very brief video of a 747 landing in a crosswind at Kai Tak
  • You want crosswind landings? Here are some Boeing test pilots landing 777s and 747s in high crosswind tests. I’ve lost track of the original email that had supporting details, but apparently they do these tests at an out of the way place in South America, where they not only get nasty crosswinds, but it won’t be so embarrassing if they bend some airplanes!

Now that’s flying.

“Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” —David Lloyd George

15 Jun 2007

Catching Up with Interesting Science/Tech Stories

posted in: science, technology | 0

While I was finishing work on Sunborn, I saved up a bunch of links to interesting new developments in science and whatnot. Time to send some your way before I lose them.

  • Astronomers have discovered dark caves, or holes in Mars! They might be a place where life could be lurking, sheltered from the sun.
  • In one of the more breathtaking views I’ve seen lately, Saturn was caught emerging from behind the Moon. It looks like a close neighbor, but really it’s over a billion kilometers away.
  • In a series of amazing images of another kind, artist Chris Jordan shows us profound views of what our consumption of products, as a society, really looks like. It’s called Running the Numbers.
  • Finally, from New Scientist, a couple more news items caught my attention: a new theoretical approach to teleportation (no, I can’t say I understand it, but…), and a new dino discovery, Gigantoraptor, a feathered dino big enough to face off with a T-Rex.

“Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

15 Jun 2007

The (High School) Graduate

posted in: personal news | 0

Last weekend, my daughter Lexi graduated from high school! Huzzah!

In all the last year of getting ready to send her off to college, it only very recently hit me that she was about to be a high school graduate. Wow—when I thought about that, somehow it seemed more profound and life-changing than merely (!) heading off to college! To celebrate, we took her out and got her a new laptop computer, which—by the time she leaves for college in August—she will have configured to her taste. (It’s also given me my first glimpse of Windows Vista, which at first glimpse doesn’t look all that different from Windows in Days of Yore.)

You go, girl!

(While her sister follows quietly at a distance, plotting her own course into the future….)

9 Jun 2007

Sunborn Finished! Again!

posted in: personal news, science fiction, Sunborn, writing | 0

I know it’s been a long time since my last post. That’s because I’ve been dug in, finishing the final (I hope!) editorial revisions on Sunborn, my new novel, due out from Tor Books in about a year. Man, what a bear this has been. I turned in the “final” draft about six months ago—except that it turned out not to be the final draft. My editor asked for a lot of work on the first hundred pages or so; he thought it started too slowly. Maybe he was right; I don’t know, I can’t tell anymore. But I did the work, and came up with a new version that we’re both happy with. While I was at it, I went through his comments on the rest of the book, and took the opportunity to streamline and tighten, with the benefit of having been away from it a few months. (And yes, this is Book 4 of The Chaos Chronicles, but you will be able to read it as a standalone if you haven’t read the first three.)

Anyway, as of today, it’s back in my editor’s hands. I printed out a clean copy (614 manuscript pages) for myself, just a short time ago. And I am going to take it easy for a little while. Maybe do some reading. Maybe write some blog entries. Who knows?

I have a bunch of other things to say, but right now I’m too tired!

Take care, and see you later!

“It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.”
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

25 May 2007

More Cool Science

posted in: quirky, science, technology | 0

New Scientist has a bunch of interesting mini-articles in today’s newsletter. And if you follow these links, you’ll see a lot of other interesting articles listed in the sidebars. Take a few minutes to browse; there’s some cool stuff.

Here’s a sampling:

Here’s one that’s more sobering than cool, but it deserves reading: Taking stock of Earth’s dwindling mineral wealth. (This one you can only read a partial of unless you’re a subscriber, but the partial is pretty interesting in itself.)

“Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.”
—Robert A. Heinlein

25 May 2007

Great Time at Bread Loaf

posted in: personal news, writing | 0

I returned a few days ago from the New England Young Writers Conference at the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College, in Vermont. It was a wonderful experience, just as it was last year. Approximately 200 high school students and home school students were in attendance, with something like 20 professional writers there as workshop leaders. Among them, I was the one SF guy (though the conference director has written fantasy); there was also a mystery writer, several YA authors, a slew of poets, and some nonfiction people. The kids were amazing. I once more was blown away by the quality and originality and daring of their work. When I was in high school, I was nowhere near their level. Plus, they were a pleasure to work with, and genuinely supportive of each other.

The writers were a great bunch to hang out with, as well. During one of the readings, I was sitting there surrounded by new friends, and thinking what a blessing it was to spend time with such interesting people. Some were folks I’d met last year, and some were new friends. I like getting together with SF people, but this was different; it was warmer somehow, maybe a little less competitive, because there was so much cross-fertilization and we all have our areas of specialty. Several of us were wishing we could all have stayed on another week, just writing and hanging out during meals and after hours.

Why not check out the web sites of some of the folks I spent time with:

Better yet, try their books:

A room without books is like a body without a soul. —Cicero

16 May 2007

Extragalactic Dark Matter Ring

posted in: science, space, writing | 0

Okay, just one more entry before I head off! This image of a 2.6-million light-year-wide ring of dark matter, surrounding a cluster of galaxies, is too incredible to pass up.


To see a gorgeous, full-sized image of it, look to Astronomy Picture of the Day.

For further explanation, read the news report at space.com. One thing they don’t say there that they do say on the APOD page is that the large blue ring is a digital modeling that has been superimposed over the Hubble image. I’m a little puzzled at the discrepancy there, and am not sure at this point whether the blue cloud is entirely a false-color representation or not. It must be, though, because the thing about dark matter is that it’s, well, dark. You can’t see it. (Except in a scene late in my novel Sunborn, but that’s another matter.)

To get a better grasp of the science behind the conclusion, check out this short Hubblecast video, which describes the gravitational lensing effect that actually supports the thesis that this really is dark matter being depicted and not just some camera artifact.

————-

In a complete change of subject, I’ll just note the passing of Jerry Falwell, who probably did more to promote the cause of bigotry and intolerance in our society than just about anyone claiming (in a chillingly distorted way) the banner of Christianity. I don’t wish him ill; but I do hope he’s seeing things a little differently now.

“To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts—such is the duty of the artist.”
—Robert A. Schumann

1 … 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 … 144