The word of the week is practical.
May 28 - Science Fiction
Tonight I was at my writer's group meeting, with a special guest speaker I had arranged to have there. Ben Coles, author of The Virtues of War, is a local Victoria author who self-published his book to critical and financial success. He gave us a wonderful two hours, speaking on his experiences as a new author and how his road took him from his initial draft all the way to having his novel on store shelves. It was extremely interesting to me especially, as the journey he took parallels my own to come as my novel progresses - I have a lot to learn but talking to someone like Ben makes me less fearful of the unknown road ahead. Ben also runs his own self-publishing company, so I have that resource to draw on in the future should I choose that route. E-publishing was also part of the discussion, which did a lot to de-mystify the subject: having an eBook doesn't hurt you in any way and can really boost the sales of your traditional book, according to Ben. It was a great, informative evening and I feel very privileged to have had Ben there to speak to us with good news and valuable tips from his experiences.
May 29 - Two for the price of Free!
In the last few days, I've been trying to get my 2nd PC working, with no success. It's a cheap old P4 that I've scrounged from eBay along with some old parts I've kept for just such a thing. It will be my 'media server' PC, that I can shove old spare hard drives into and use to serve TV series, movies and the like to the TV, as well as music... all that and probably some network backup too. I've been looking forward to having a 'spare' PC to play around with and given that I have a few terabytes of old hard drives here, there's no shortage of space to work with. Of course, I have to get the thing working first... and tonight I did, after discovering ALL my efforts were wasted: I looked inside the case to discover that the twerps at the factory had FORGOTTEN to hook up the power button's cord! ARGH! Such a simple thing and it cost me days of head-scratching... and this case is from Zalman, a company KNOWN for it's fine cases. To have them mess up such a simple thing is almost unbelievable.
Know what the irony of all that is? Today I found TWO complete PC's sitting out by the back dumpster, completely intact! One was missing the power supply, but otherwise they EACH still had their CPU's, RAM, DVD-ROM's and TWO hard drives each! I rather giddily hustled them inside and after dusting them out, I powered up the one - it ran perfectly AND even had Win7 installed! I'll as like end up wiping them and selling them on eBay for fifty bucks or so, but still... it boggles my mind that some people just toss things like these out, in perfect shape!
May 30 - Space Command is go!
The old space TV serials are a little before my time, but I can appreciate the contribution they made to getting science fiction into the mainstream. I loved Flash Gordon's adventures, so the idea of a new similar series making it to the screen in this modern age was rather appealing to me. Imagine my delight when I heard that a Kickstarter project with JUST that ideal in mind recently found itself fully funded in just 3 days - huzzah! Space Command is a series idea that springs from the mind of Marc Zicree, who has extensive credits working with television and science fiction in general including Babylon 5. He is a huge fan of the old space serials, like Space Patrol, and wants to create a series that is positve and hopeful of the future while having fun with some drama for spice. Check out his video pitch for Space Command, it's great:
May 31 - Happy Early Birthday, Mom!
Dinner tonight was with my family at the Waddling Dog Pub in Saanich, as tonight was All-You-Can-Eat Pasta night! Being part Italian, this spoke to me on many levels… I was just too busy eating to reply. We were out tonight to celebrate my mother's birthday two days early, as my dad had to work the next few days and it would have been impossible for all of us to have dinner together in the evening otherwise. Just like the last time we were there, the pasta was dimply delicious: we were able to add in any of two dozen ingredients as well as a dozen spices to make each dish exactly suit out tastes. And the portions! We needed two hands to hold the metric ton of good food that was served up; I was hungry for a change and STILL had to take half home with me! I can well see some people slipping into food comas eating this much… but I was merely pleasantly full and enjoyed the company of my family even more.
June 1 - Summer's Here
It's been a LONG time since I mentioned BACON in my blog, for various reasons. As some of you may know, I love bacon a LOT… and I don't like coffee a LOT. So I had to really stretch today when I picked up a Bacon Latte at Moka House Hillside - Bacon yay, coffee not so much. The fact that I got it for a dollar was icing on the cake: as part of a FBook promo, any drink was a dollar! Which was good, as the bacon latte… wasn't. It tasted very strongly of coffee and had no bacon-y taste I could detect; I was rather disappointed. Seeing as it was the first coffee I'd deliberately had in several decades, I was glad to be having it in the afternoon so as not to affect my sleep. Which it didn't. Bacon = zero, coffee = zero. Dang
Also on people's minds lately is the weather; it's rather cool here for late May and now early June. It brings to mind 'June-uary' back in 2010, which was rather cool as well - local news channel CTV ran a story about it this week. Brrr!
June 2 - Day Out And About!
Today turned into a total day out unintentionally, which was great. I did breakfast at the Blue Fox with my friend Kevin, then headed out of town to Langford to spend a few hours people-watching at the Starbucks on Goldstream. The sun was shining and a ton of people were out thanks to the good weather. I visited my mom for a few hours as well, as it's her birthday today and I'm again thrilled that she's still here to enjoy it given the crazy events of the last year with blood clots and the like. 2012 could have been a VERY different, sadder year...
Later in the afternoon I saw The Avengers for the second time and enjoyed it just as thoroughly. A lot of smaller details stood out this time around, as did the humour - the Hulk stole the show again. The shawarma scene at the end was still just priceless and well worth sitting through all the credits. You can really see on the screen all the effort that has been poured into the film and I'll enjoy it again a third time when I pick it up on Blue-Ray before the end of the year. High-Def Marvel goodness, yeah!
June 3 - Torn by Tech
It's so cool, but do I have a use for it?
I love cool technology... and yesterday I spotted the above laptop at Future Shop on the way out to see The Avengers. It has TWO 14" touchscreens instead of the normal screen-keyboard layout, which got my attention. What made my fingers twitch was that it was marked down from $1,199 to $699 ... $500 off - gah!! All day long today, my mind whirled with the question "What can I use it for?" as it usually does when I see tech I haven't come across before... and sadly, I couldn't find a solid answer. There is NO compelling reason for me to jump on this deal( aside from the still-hefty price )apart from simply looking cool while sitting in the local coffee shop. Which would get old fast, especially as the thing is easily twice the size of my current ASUS TF101 tablet, which DOES have an actual keyboard and so makes it comfortable to type compared to tapping on a screen. Much as it pains me( yep )I had to set aside my g33ky wants today and let the Needs dictate my actions... while making a mental note to keep an eye on eBay for the next few years to see if any of these Acer units pop up!
I slept in fitfully today, as I've rather tired for some reason of late. My arms have begun hurting again as well, so this week I'll be digging DEEP into all I can learn about stretching and recovering from CTS - I am tired of being unable to type more than a few hundred words an hour while in pain. I'm willing to suffer for my novel but not to the point of crippling myself into a state where I have to learn to type with my toes.
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