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Review: John Carter (of Mars)

Apr 7th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments

I wrote this three weeks ago and then forgot to take the file to Chicago, duhh. I assume everybody’s seen the film by now, but I’m not sure what else to do with the review but post it.

carterswoola.jpgSaw John Carter with a few geek friends, all of them (but me) EEs. It got lousy reviews for the most part, but I was intrigued by the idea of a quarter-billion dollar pulp novel. Because I know what pulp novels are (and because I read A Princess of Mars when I was 15 or so) I was by no means disappointed. Guys, it’s a pulp novel. This means that it’s either about cleavage or else bashing your enemies to a pulp.

Disney made this one, so the cleavage is minimal, and the pulping quite bloodless. The costuming and CGI creations, on the other hand, were breathtaking in a sort of half-Spartacus, half-Steampunk way that we don’t see very often. (I really can’t think of another example, though the very uneven 1961 George Pal film Atlantis, the Lost Continent comes close.) Much of the film was shot on location on an alien planet called Utah. The rest came out of whole CGI cloth.

And that, my friends was worth seeing. The tusked, four-armed native Martians called Tharks looked absolutely real, right down to the eyes. They fidgeted, they pouted, they even wept, and they did not all look alike. It is a credit to the production quality and attention to detail that in other films the Tharks might be consider monsters; here they were more or less the bad boys you stayed away from in high school or (very) occasionally befriended. There actually weren’t a lot of monsters, once you discount the Tharks as ugly but mostly human dumbasses. One of them, however, was my favorite living thing in the whole film: Carter’s six-legged Martian dog sidekick Woola (technically a calot) who might accurately be described as Jabba the Mutt.

I liked the human characters a lot less. After all, I’ve already seen Spartacus. Carter himself (Taylor Kitsch) was forgettable beefcake. The bald guys were unconvincing, and reminded me of mysterious, hair-challenged heavies in a multitude of bad media pieces all the way back to Ming the Merciless. The princess-scientist Deja Thoris had remarkably durable eye makeup considering the roughousing she engages in. Then again, so did Sophia Loren in the underappreciated 1957 big gun epic The Pride and the Passion. (So, in fact, do most movie heroines who aren’t ugly by design.) The Zodangans and the denizens of the city of Helium (what was Burroughs thinking?) were toga-epic extras, who brought all the passion of plum pudding to their parts.

I twitched every time I heard someone say, “…then Helium falls.” Hey, if Helium falls, why do we fill blimps with it?

The steampunkish walking city of Zodanga was a nice touch, explaining as it does why Mars appears to have long lines spanning its deserts. That’s just Zodanga tracks, and Zodanga has a lot of legs. Nonetheless, it’s a very big item, and if you’re not so dumb as to just sit and wait for it to step on you, I’d guess it’s fairly easy to outrun.

Unfortunately, the one big thing that bothered me immensely in the film was key to the plot: Carter’s Supermannish ability to jump a hundred feet straight up, supposedly because of the lower gravity on Mars. Sorry, no. Mars’s gravity is 3/8 that of Earth, so a 200-pound ruffian would still weigh 75 pounds. I might believe fifteen feet straight up, or 60 feet in a horizontal long jump with a good running start. And if Carter can, the slender and apparently muscular Tharks should be able to. Not so.

That’s my main complaint, apart from the fact it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what’s going on. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t care. John Carter is about spectacle; fights among improbable flying machines, goofy aliens, and endless startling things purchased by the compound interest of Moore’s Law. Don’t expect it to make sense. (Alas, don’t expect it to make much money, either.) Resist the temptation to crack helium jokes. (If Deja Thoris is a Princess of Helium, why doesn’t she have a squeaky voice?) Just turn your brain off and enjoy the scenery.

Guiltily recommended.

Odd Lots

Mar 9th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment
  • I was wrong about Diesel engines being easy to make, as I suggested in my entry for March 5, 2012. Fuel injection, as it turns out, is a bitch. You’re trying to divide oil into a multitude of very small droplets of (reasonably) consistent size. Gasoline carburetion, by comparison, is a snap. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht, an automotive engineer, for the reminder.)
  • I suspect it’s easier to produce wood gas (AKA “producer gas”) at a small scale than gasoline. In a future where large-scale oil refiners are no more, a Dieselpunk society could power internal combustion engines with wood gas. This has been done a lot around the world, especially during WWII when oil supply channels were disrupted.
  • This has little or nothing to do with the Holy Roman Empire, but if you’re a map freak, boy–budget a day for it. Wow.
  • This looks like a good book, especially if you’re finding it hard to keep track of genre mutation within SFF. Will order and report after reading. (Thanks to Trudy Seabrook for pointing it out.)
  • We found one of these in a drawer in my late grandfather’s workbench after my grandmother died in 1965 and we had to sell their house. I never knew what it was until it made the A-head story on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal , in an article about…olympic sheep shearing. My grandfather lived a quiet life in a modest house on a tiny lot on Chicago’s north side. There wasn’t a sheep for miles. (I hope he didn’t use it to cut my father’s hair.)
  • I’ve noted some confusion about this: “Retina display” is not an Apple trademark, but a technical term: a display with such high resolution that the eye can’t make out individual pixels at typical reading distance. Here’s a good explanation of the whole retina display concept. The new iPad certainly qualifies, but it wasn’t the first. Asus’ Tranformer Prime was there some time ago. Retina-quality displays are made by several vendors, and will eventually appear in other high-end tablets.
  • The Lytro camera has been mentioned in a lot of places, but here’s the first in-depth description I’ve seen. A camera that allows you to fiddle with the focus after the shot is taken is FM, if you know what I mean. I ditch about a third of my digital photos (mostly taken in bad light) for focus problems. It’s an awkward form factor, but if it’s the first of it’s kind, I’ll assume the next one will fit the hand a little better.
  • The mad scientist in me cried out when I saw this. I need a castle. I need a kite. I need a monster.

Falling Back to Dieselpunk

Mar 5th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
13 comments

My writing time has taken some hits in the last few weeks, but the weather has hugely improved. It got up to 72 here today, so with joyous enthusiasm I took a long walk. As usual, something occurred to me, this time when a badly adjusted dump truck went past and bathed me in fumes. Ahh! Dieselpunk!

The insight followed soon after: If the world went to hell for some reason and I had to build a vehicle, it wouldn’t be steam. It would be Diesel. With some study and care, you could render farm animals or even roadkill and make Diesel fuel. Diesel engine technology requires machining and some skill, but not exotic materials nor computer models. (The same is true of gasoline engines, but gasoline is harder to make than Diesel.) You can do it in a garage. Clean rooms not required.

I had some experience in thinking about recovering technology after a societal crash while creating the Drumlins world. The glitch there is that all the inadvertent colonists’ knowledge was in computers, but they didn’t have the critical mass of technology to make more computers, nor even fix the ones that broke. (Quick! We need ten pounds of indium! Jimmy, Sam! Go dig around and see what you can find!) So when the computers died, their technology died too, and they were back to a medieval style of life that might have stayed medieval except for the Thingmakers that shared the planet with them. Advanced technologies build on simpler technologies, which in turn depend on simpler technologies still. It made me wonder if there were a sort of minimum technology level, one that, with common sense, an oral tradition, and few old books, might be constructed more or less from scratch.

Speculation: Steampunk might be a consequence of ignorance (i.e., we don’t know enough yet) whereas Dieselpunk might be a consequence of a sort of poverty of connectedness (i.e., our societal matrix is neither large enough nor rich enough to build what we might find in old books or otherwise imagine, even if we knew how.)

It occurred to me that there was an interesting plateau of sorts between about 1920 and 1940. Most of the stuff that existed in 1940 existed in a slightly cruder form in 1920. During those two decades, we got better at doing the stuff we did before, but we didn’t invent a great deal of truly new stuff. WWII changed everything, of course, and nuclear energy and transistors and many exotic materials showed up by 1950.

The era 1920-1950 was the Golden Age of Back Room Science and Technology. You could do lots of interesting things with an engine lathe, a microscope, a slide rule, a gas stove, a source of electricity, and raw materials you could buy at the local drugstore, hardware store, and feed store. The science was straightforward, the technology simple. Most important of all, it was still possible to be a generalist. A hundred books (Ok, maybe two hundred) could teach you most of what we knew in the hard sciences. You could usefully master physics, chemistry, and math in less than a lifetime. Specialization has always existed, of course, but I think it became mandatory after 1950. After that, you could no longer hear street traffic near a university for Asimov’s Sound of Panting.

If the population of Earth were reduced by three quarters (especially by something limited to human beings, like a very nasty flu virus) high-tech civilization might no longer have the critical mass of human skill it would take to maintain itself. The computers would work for awhile, but after they died, all the support infrastructure (chip foundries etc.) would die with them, and what would be left after a few decades would be less Mad Max than Dieselpunk.

All that’s debatable, of course, and I could be completely wrong. I bring it up only as an insight obtained by getting out in the sunlight for the first time this cold season and making the blood pump a little. I’m taking notes on a fictional setting involving a new Ice Age, and now I’m sure it’ll be a Dieselpunk culture, with no computers but a great deal of steel, vacuum tubes, carbon black soot, and internal combustion. Neanderthals, too: Brute muscle mattered before WWII in a way it may never matter again. And airships–hey, they were huge in the ’30s! (Why let the steampunkers have all the fun?)

Now for the time and energy to finish what I’m working on now so I can get on to The Gathering Ice.

Odd Lots

Feb 15th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

Odd Lots

Feb 8th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • For the several people who asked: The odor-free carpet pad that we used in carpeting the lower level here is called Napa Carpet Cushion, from Leggett & Platt.
  • Apart from N&P’s Fallen Angels, Bob Tucker’s Ice and Iron, and possibly Mackelworth’s Tiltangle, what other SF novels involve an ice age on Earth in the near(ish) future? I have a concept that capitalizes on all my recent paleoclimate research, and I’d like to see if it’s already been done.
  • Whoops, found a list just before posting this. I clearly have some reading to do, assuming I can find any of these items. What are your personal favorites?
  • Today’s sunspot number is very close to zero. I haven’t seen sunspot activity this low in some time, and here we are supposedly barreling into the Cycle 24 maximum. The sunspot number is going in the wrong direction. 6M DX is evidently not in my immediate future.
  • Joe Flamini and Jack Smith are both pretty sure that the mysterious Comco gizmo I presented in my February 6, 2012 entry is an early remote control unit for commercial and public service radio systems, allowing control of a transmitter or repeater through leased phone lines. More on this in a future entry.
  • Having read briefly about hydraulic analog computing in a magazine decades ago, I built hydraulic calculators and computers into the technological background for my novel The Cunning Blood. Turns out the Russians did it on a pretty large scale back in the years running up to WWII. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
  • From the You-Probably-Couldn’t-Do-That-Today Department: The flipside of the Chad Mitchell Trio’s 1963 hit kid/Christmas 45 “The Marvelous Toy” was “The Bonny Streets of Fyve-I-O, about a colonel who shoots one of his own captains for insubordination.
  • Tucows (does anybody even remember Tucows?) is launching a contract-free mobile service using Sprint’s network. The rates are interesting, and favor people who want smartphones but just don’t use them much, and data little or not at all.
  • The Maker Shed has a $99 Geiger counter kit that allows logging of pulses through a serial port, and detects both beta and gamma radiation.
  • A little gruesome maybe, but it’s real: When we lived in California in the late ’80s, there were reports of sneakers washing up on Santa Cruz area beaches…with human feet still inside them. At the time we assumed drug violence, but there’s a less scurrilous if no less ghastly explanation for a phenomenon that’s still happening. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Mmmph. Military combat aircraft should be able to fly in more air than we’re used to, no? Sweden had this problem recently. (I’m guessing that Saab has it too, now.) Thanks to Aki Peltonen for the link.
  • The name of my company, Copperwood Media, LLC, was inspired by a set of traces on an old PCB that just happened to look (a little) like a tree. I had an artist draw me a better copper tree for the logo, way back in 2000. Now Rich Rostrom sends a link to the odd tradition in some parts of the UK of hammering coins into cracks in trees until the notion of “copperwood” takes on a whole new meaning.
  • Some very nice steampunk watches and jewelry. “Chronambulator” is a great word, whether or not you’ve got a steampunk gizmo to hang it on. Note also the level-reading absinthe hip-flask. (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)

Indies and Gatekeepers

Feb 4th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Janet Perlman put me on to this article about why indie publishers (a category that may or may not include self publishers, depending on whom you talk to) get no respect. The whole piece might be summed up this way:

  • Quality is hard work.
  • Quality is expensive.
  • Quantity is no substitute for quality.

I agree, as far as it goes. But that’s not the whole story. You can break a sweat and write a superb novel at considerable expense of time and energy. You can pay an editor to look at it and perhaps fix certain things. You can pay an artist for a great cover. You can pay somebody to do a great page layout, generate print images, ebook files, and so on. Having shelled out all that expense in time, money, and personal energy, you are not likely to sell many books or become especially well-known. Publishing is an unfair business in a lot of ways.

Perhaps the most unfair thing about publishing as we know it now is that it cares not a whit about quality. Sure, the publishers will tell you otherwise. So will the agents, and so will the retailers, assuming you can find any these days. Alas, it’s not true. Publishers, agents, and retailers are indeed our gatekeepers, and the gates are tightly kept. The gates do not open for quality, alas. The gates open in the hope of making money.

This is true not only in quirky markets like fiction (more on which in a moment) but in technical publishing as well. I’ve received and rejected beautifully written books that were well-organized and basically error-free, for a simple reason: The Radish programming language (I just made that up) is used by 117 people world-wide, which means the total worldwide market for a book about Radish is 116. (The author already has a copy.) On the flipside, the best possible book on Windows XP won’t be accepted at any traditional publishing house, because all the books on XP that the universe needs were written a long time ago.

The reverse is also true, to some extent. If a publisher thinks your book will make money, the book will probably be published. Being well-written doesn’t change this equation much. Back in the Coriolis era I spent a lot of money on developmental editors to make a manuscript readable in those cases where I suspected (after market analysis) that the book met a hitherto unmet need. I wasn’t always right, of course, but the point is that I didn’t accept or reject books based on any judgment of quality. What I was looking for was market demand.

This is true of fiction as well, in spades. I picked up Cherie Priest’s steampunk entry Dreadnought last year, and had to force myself to finish it. Two other people in my circle, who live 1,000 miles apart and don’t know one another, both described the book in a single word: Unreadable. (Another said the same of her earlier book, Boneshaker.) Dreadnought was dull, slow, short on ideas, over-descriptive in some places and far too sparse in others. Yet Cherie’s got a following and is evidently doing very well. Somebody at Tor thought her books would make money and took a chance. They were right. That doesn’t make them well-written. (I did like the covers, and covers do matter–if you can get them in front of the readers somehow.)

I don’t want to be seen as picking on Cherie, who will doubtless chew me out if she reads this. It’s a pretty common thing. Nor is it a new thing. Decades ago I read a lot of abominable novels, from Sacred Locomotive Flies to Garbage World. They got into the stores. They probably made their authors at least a little money. (They got mine, after all.) They were crap.

If Dreadnought made money, why would a book that was better written not make money? It’s a long list. The author may not have been able to get a hearing from the gatekeepers in the first place. Luck is needed here, as well as brute persistence, not that persistence is any guarantee. The topic may be considered out of style, or just worked out and already done to death. It may be too long. (I ran into this trouble with The Cunning Blood. Unit manufacturing cost matters.) The book may have been judged to push buttons in the public mind that the publisher would prefer not to push. (Back when I was in high school I read a purely textual porn comedy novel that was brilliantly written and hilarious. Would I publish it? Not on your life.) Books that demean women or minorities a little too much, or focus on cruelty to animals (or probably a number of other things) won’t be picked up as easily, and it has nothing to do with quality. It’s tough to make money in publishing, and publishers are trolling for as broad a market as possible.

This is why I think the article on HuffPo cited above is misleading. Quality is a problem, but not as much of a problem as the author thinks, and not in the same ways. Worse, solving the quality problem won’t make an indie publisher’s books any more likely to get into B&N, and suggesting to indie publishers that they will is just dishonest.

So what’s the answer? Don’t know. There may not be one. The publishing industry is in the process of changing state, and nobody knows what we’ll inherit in five or ten years. Losing B&N (or waking up one day to find that B&N is a tenth the size it was yesterday) could work to indie publishing’s advantage, at least if independent bookstores fill the subsequent vacuum. The more gates to the retail channel there are, the more likely it is that one will open when you buzz. Self-published ebooks have worked for people like Amanda Hocking with Herculean energy who write for twelve hours and then promote themselves the other twelve. Tonnage can get you noticed, even if it’s bad tonnage.

For the rest of us, again, I don’t know. Quality in all writing (fiction especially) is not the choke point. It’s an unfair and beneath it all a mysterious business. Submit good work if you can, but be prepared to have the gates shut in your face a lot. That’s just what gates do.

Theme Creep

Feb 1st, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

Sorry for being gone so long. I guess I just had to get past January. We saw the last of the painters this morning, and the only remaining big piece of this ever-expanding remodeling puzzle is the floor coverings. I wouldn’t have thought that getting bids on carpeting would be this hard. It is, at least if you don’t want to get crap carpet and have it installed by idiots. (Now on our seventh house, we’re fussy. Real fussy.) I’m doing two more Elfa buildouts, and shopping for some new office furniture. When I’ve had the energy and presence of mind to write, I made an executive decision to devote it to Ten Gentle Opportunities rather than blogging.

I lost a lot of time in the last few months, but that had nothing to do with the novel. It’s cooking along, and I got another 1,600 words down yesterday. In reading the new material over last night, I realized that something interesting had begun happening when I wasn’t quite looking: The theme was changing, and not necessarily in a good direction.

Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. The idea came out of a thoroughly trunk-ish humorous novelette that I wrote in 1981 and buried in embarrassment, concerning a newly built but malfunctioning AI copier that decides that it’s God, and declares jihad against the hapless AI process controller that runs the copier factory. In 1984, my fiction mentor Nancy Kress agreed to collaborate with me on a revision of the concept at novel-length as a half-fantasy love story, adding in a universe-jumping magic hacker (in the manner of Harold Shea) who drops in on a small advertising agency in Rochester, New York to hide from a berserk magician, and magic that “maps” to software in our boring, magic-free world. The magic hacker acts as a catalyst to heal the relationship of two middle-aged people, and in the process learns about software. When he returns to his own universe, he discovers that software “maps” to a form of magic far more potent than anything his erstwhile tormenter can summon. End of story.

In our 1984 effort, there were only two AIs: one the factory controller, and the other a tinkered-up magical intelligence that maps to software in our world. In a brief (and silly) subplot, the magical software falls in love with the factory controller, and in a sort of virtual sexual union, they combine into something a good deal more capable than either was on its own. Mostly, the AIs were played for laughs and acted as foils to the human hero and heroine, whose relationship they loosely echoed.

The concept had promise, but in 1984 I was only barely a grownup (32) and just couldn’t pull it off. Nancy graciously ceded me her portions, and everything went back into the trunk, where it stayed until 2006. I pulled it out and read it over that year, and very abruptly, brand-new scenes began rising out of the cluttered back rooms of my subconscious. I sat down one evening and wrote a new opening, “just for fun.” Boom! Suddenly I had a rigorous system of magic, a magical intellect that spoke only in poetry, an evolved magical predator resembling a lamprey from the astral planes, zombies dancing the Macarena, a 3-D processor technology that packs tens of thousands of execution cores into a blade module, the Triumph of Pascal (as a fictional but heavily parallel language called HyperLang, get it?) and several more AIs.

The love story was still there in the middle of it all, at least in the outline. Now, I have this old habit of heaving ideas into a story with a pitchfork. Once I grabbed my pitchfork, the love story started to get buried in ideas, most of which lay in the AI characters. What does it really take to make an AI that looks and sounds like a human being? If you start with something powerful but alien and make it human by shooting it full of NOPs and bad animation, is that a win? What would the AIs think once they understood what was going on?

Is virtual suffering real suffering?

I’ve done idea stories all my writing life, but I’ve never done a love story. I guess it’s not surprising that I’m having a lot of fun with the ideas, and a lot of heartburn over the human relationships. I’m doing my best. The path of least resistance, however, is to have fun with the AIs and their virtual lives in the Tooniverse while the human characters recede into the background. If I’m not careful and don’t begin paying attention to my outline, that is precisely what’s going to happen. I looked in the mirror this morning while shaving and said, “Be warned.”

In some ways the story has come full-circle. It was originally a battle between a humorless factory controller system and a psychotic AI living in a faulty networked copier. I’m having to struggle a little now to keep it from becoming The League of Exceptional Software pitted against slobbering malware from another universe, while their human friends look on in befuddlement and occasionally cheer.

Most of my stories have evolved as they crossed the brain/fingers barrier. A lot of them have died in the evolving, which is why my trunk, in terms of paper alone, weighs thirty or forty pounds. I’m determined not to lose Ten Gentle Opportunities the same way. After all, it’s taken literally half my life to write, and I have only so many half-lives to go.

Unhappy Old Year

Jan 1st, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

So. Once again we rebooted the calendar, and it worked. Whew. Couldn’t have happened soon enough. This year had its moments, but it wasn’t among the best I can recall, though it stands shoulders above 2002.

The year began with the worst flu I’ve had in 35 years. Lesson: Get your flu shots! Carol did. I didn’t. Q.E.D. There was other illness in the family that I won’t talk about, though nothing life-threatening. For that we have to move out into our friendscape. We lost Prudy Stewart, a stalwart from the local Bichon Frise Club, along with Harold Shippey, a gentleman in our camping group. Two of my grade school teachers died within a couple of months of one another: Mrs. Mary Clare Toffenetti, who taught art and French at IC school, and Mrs. Mary Veronica Condon, who taught third grade and also French. Dan Matthews, one of the kids in my grade school class, who had been a close friend for several years, died on Christmas Day. Just last night, one of our parishioners, who generally sat two pews behind us at church, had a serious heart attack. He’s in a coma and is not expected to survive.

All this since November 1, sheesh.

Oh, and my house almost blew up. Settling soil has been our bane here for years now. We had to empty the lower level and get the slab mudjacked, and are still fooling with paint chips and carpet samples now that the carpet’s been torn up anyway. All of my SF and most of my electronics magazines are packed and out of reach. It’s a mess.

For good things to report I’ll begin with the completion of Drumlin Circus, a 53,000 word short novel that came together in one furious six-week period, during which I wrote as much as 5,000 words in a single day. Jim Strickland and I put a tete-beche double novel on the market, incorporating Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings, both tales from the Drumlins World.

Jim and I attended the Taos Toolbox writers’ workshop in July, conducted by Walter Jon Williams and taught by Walter and my SF mentor Nancy Kress. I described the workshop in two entries after we got back, and would have continued if my damned gas line hadn’t threatened to ignite virtually under my feet. (I hope to write a little more about the workshop in coming days.) I will say right now that if you have a little experience in SF or fantasy, Taos Toolbox is spectacular. Granted, it’s expensive, and almost unbelievably intense. Jim describes it as a 500-level graduate course in the art of the novel compressed into two weeks, and that sounds about right. Walter is currently accepting applications for the 2012 workshop, and I give it my wholehearted recommendation. I met a lot of wonderful people, workshopped 15,000 words of my current novel-in-progress, Ten Gentle Opportunities, and returned with new dedication to the craft of fiction. I’d hoped to finish TGO by the end of the year, but (as described above) the year did not cooperate. The new target is April 1. Snotty AIs, zombies dancing the Macarena, a copier factory gone rogue, magic as software, physics as alternate magic, and malware from another universe…hey, what else d’ya want?

On October 2, Carol and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. We spent ten days on Oahu, generating enough gumption to start having the lower level rehabbed when we got back. It took everything we could generate, and more.

I joined the Writers Write! group here locally, and have made many friends there. The group’s motto is Just write the damn book! It’s advice I need to take.

Those are the broad strokes. Scattered among the days were little flashes of light and minor grunts of annoyance. My brakes have needed work three times. I met Cynthia Felice. My new superregenerative FM receiver has dead spots. I finished a nice steampunk computer table. That sort of thing; up and down on an almost daily basis.

I have high hopes for 2012. Carol and I have deliberately held back opening our Christmas presents until January 6th to get an upbeat start on the year, and 2012’s first 18 hours have gone pretty well. I won’t try to draw any conclusions from the data points presented. Hey, sea level dropped 6mm in 2010 alone. Blips happen, so let’s not read too much into any of them. It’s not the end of the Holocene…yet. Then there’s the Mayan calendar. Y2KXII, anybody? Let’s party!)

Happy new year, everyone. Strive to appreciate your friends this year. (You won’t have them forever!) Write more. Worry less. Go outside and check your gas pipes. Eat fat and drink sweet wine, and make sure you share what you have with others. I’ll be here when you need me.

Odd Lots

Dec 31st, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • Here’s a great site on older toy and hobbyist robots; if you’re a collector or just a nostalgist, it’s a must-see. (Maybe some here have never seen my late 70s robot Cosmo Klein.) Alas, the link came from an old email sent by the late George M. Ewing WA8WTE, who suggested it as an Odd Lot. Better late than never.
  • We used to giggle at the name in the mid-60s, but the founder of Blonder-Tongue Labs is still alive, and maintains a site full of interesting tech information about crystal sets and old radios, as well as the firm’s patents and products from long ago. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link; again, set aside more than a year ago and never used.)
  • No tablet here yet (waiting to see what if anything pops up at CES 2012) but I’m tempted to get a Nook Color so I can at least quit reading ebooks on my dinosaur of an X41. My friend Erbo has learned a lot about rooting it and running CyanogenMod, and has much good to say about the combo.
  • If you’re considering that step, consider the peculiar nature of the Android OS itself, which may not exist in precisely the same way that Windows exists. This is still good, but you need to understand it, as it’s a newish thing in the computing universe.
  • I’ll never buy one of these, but I admire the concept: An off-the-shelf smartphone-controlled video-equipped RC helicopter. And I admit: If it weren’t for OWS I wouldn’t have heard of them at all.
  • Henry Law called my attention to the fact that County Down in Northern Ireland is often called “Drumlin Country” because of its landforms. Odd then that “The Star of County Down” is one of my favorite Irish folk songs, and has been since I first heard it circa 2000–which is precisely when I wrote “Drumlin Boiler,” the first tale in the Drumlins Saga.
  • And of course, when the starship Origen is marooned in the Drumlins system, it is the mere handful of collectible print books on board that allow the castaways to gradually re-create a modern society on an alien world. The cheap consumer-grade tablet PCs in every passenger pocket were all dead inside of fifteen years (most far sooner than that) and nobody thought to create printing presses before they were gone. No wonder that the cult of the printed book rises as the age of the printed book fades. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
  • Talk partisan political hatred all the time, and prepare to reap the wind.
  • Can we please add “Google is your friend,” “denier,” and “talking points” to this list? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • And with that, the curtain falls on 2011. May the impact of the curtain give it multiple broken bones, concussions, contusions, internal bleeding, hemorrhoids, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and whatever else it might take to keep this year from darkening our doorsteps ever again.

Odd Lots

Nov 24th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments
  • Happy Thanksgiving Day to all who celebrate it–and to those who don’t, well, this guy is still thankful that the world is big enough for both of us. In terms of Thanksgiving Day meditations, I’ll simply offer the one I wrote in 2008. I may not ever do better than that.
  • From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday File: seedbox, a remote and generally headless system on a high-bandwidth Internet connection, used exclusively to seed torrents in defiance of ISP speed-throttling of BitTorrent users.
  • Also pertinent to yesterday’s entry: Penguin Books got into a snit of lender’s remorse, and basically shut down access to its titles previously available to public library patrons through Amazon’s Kindle lending program. Apparently the DRM wasn’t DRM-y enough, and Penguin (through the Overdrive technology) locked its titles out. Precisely what the technical issues are is still unclear, but I’m researching it.
  • We have lost Anne McCaffrey, at age 85. She died of a stroke at her home in Ireland on November 21. She was the first woman to earn a Hugo or a Nebula award, and did a great deal to drag SF out of the locker room to which the pulps had led it.
  • Having recently become an Android user (via my Droid X2) I have now begun to dream of SparkFun’s Electric Sheep.
  • Debsnews now has a wine channel. It’s one way to focus in on specific short videos (example: WalMart’s new $3 wine line) without having to spend a third of your life parked in front of a TV.
  • Anybody who’s tried to spread a Ziplock bag with one hand while pouring leftover spaghetti sauce into it with the other may appreciate this gadget. Everybody else, move along.
  • Many people are sending me links to stories about canned goods containing greater than acceptable levels of BPA. This is not new news. However, I didn’t know about it until yesterday, right after opening a can of Spam.
  • Maybe the new Spam Singles packaging is the answer. No can!
  • Carol met Colonel Sanders at the Mayo Clinic back in 1975, and the guy does get around. You can now see him from space. This is not photoshopped, but the real deal. It’s been there since 2006, and consists of 87,000 colored tile “pixels.” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
  • Make describes a steam-powered bristlebot. Somehow this reminds me of those little scrubbing-bubble guys on the TV commercials.
  • There may be another reason (quite apart from battery life) to turn your smartphone’s power off every night. (Thanks to Pamela Boulais for the link.)
  • If you’ve never gone up to the Car Talk Web site and looked at the staff credits page, you’re missing out on people you haven’t seen since your study hall attendance-sheet days. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
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