Just a quick update. I've hooked Google Analytics up on jamesrstrickland.com on all the main pages. If you see any bugs, slowdowns, or weirdness, let me know.
Also, I have not and will not hook up Addsense, so if you see ads on my website for anything that doesn't seem like one of my novels, please yell.
-JRS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8419147.stm
I've been predicting for some time that remotely operated drones won't be the wave of the future, because they can be co-opted. In this case, apparently, it's the result of stupidity rather than a technological defeat. But there will come a time when digital command and control are a liability. One hopes the military planners in the civilized world have planned for this. Given the above, I have my doubts.
[edit: link activated.]
-JRS
It's been a while since I've posted here.
I have a project I'm working on to try and export the playlists I listen to into some useful fashion onto this blog. So far, it's been unsuccessful. Itunes has a lot of useful information locked up in it, but it's irritatingly tight-fisted with letting anything else see that information.
Meantime, I gave up on National Novel Writing month this year. It was giving me too much stress and I was ten thousand words behind by the time I gave up. I'll try again next year.
I have been plugging along on /Einstein's Blues/ what was originally my 2006 Nano novel, in hopes of finishing it ready to sell some time this spring. I gave a short reading from it at Mile Hi Con, which was remarkably well received, which was a great boost.
Working on Chapter 4 today, and came up with this paragraph, brand new today, that gives you a bit of the tone of the novel:
Lander, like most colonial cities, grew like tree rings around the point where the colonists' boots first touched the ground. The first years after arrival at a new planet are tough, and the city developed in a thin, tenuous ring clinging to the brand new, prefabricated lowport end of the cable that led to the ship above. Over time, as more ships arrived with more people and materials, Lander grew around that first ring, more in good years, less in bad years, expanding into those first generation agricultural fields, into the Mordor plain, as D pointed out, and up over the Spender hills where the dragons once roamed. Inevitably, though, the growth slowed down. The colony ships were all gone, save the one they cannibalized as the highport on the orbital wire. Interstellar commerce hadn't really picked up. LowTown, as first few rings around the lowport became known, became a morass of run-down, empty warehouses, unlicensed brothels, titty bars, rough clubs, cheaper flop houses. Lander's very own honest-to-god nasty shithole of a slum. Naturally, this attracted musicians.
