Little bits of the future keep arriving

Walter Jon Williams posted recently about his book HardWired, and how the present has caught up with the things he predicted therein. I've had the same experience from time to time with the LookingGlass world. What's worse is that unlike WJW, I still have unpublished (and one more unwritten) work set in that world. Damned inconvenient, that. Anyway. For those who've read Looking Glass and/or Irreconcilable Differences and wondered what I was getting at with the whole Penguini thing, well... pretty much something like this PicoTux except with more network interfaces on it.

-JRS

Kindle 2, two for Kindle

Today, Amazon.com announced the Kindle 2, the updated version of their well known e-book reader. I've mentioned the original Kindle before, and I received one for Christmas in 2007 from my lovely and generous wife, so I had to work with my publisher to make my work available on that platform.

So in light of today's Kindle 2 announcement, I have an announcement of my own. Both my novels, Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences are now in the Amazon Kindle Store, for 99 cents each, available for instant download over the Kindle's wireless network.

The way I see it, e-books are poised to replace the old mass-market paperback format as the way to try out new authors without investing a lot of money. Books are expensive these days, and money's tight, and I understand it's a tall order to ask you to take a chance on an author you don't know and spend fifteen bucks for the privilege. If you have a Kindle or, soon, if you get a Kindle 2, you can try my work out for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

For those of you without Kindles, or with other kinds of e-book readers, these same e-books are available on my website for an even more attractive price. Free. :)

Links: Looking Glass for Kindle Irreconcilable Differences for Kindle The Downloads Page on my Website.

(Some browsers seem to be gagging on my download files. Please try right-clicking on the e-book links and saving the files, to prevent your browser from doing the wrong thing to the e-books when you download.)

Browsers?

Would anyone who is reading this blog please let me know (in the next two days) if you are my 18% of users still using IE 6, or my 11% of users using IE 5.01? I'm in the process of making a huge overhaul of the website, and initial testing of the new design with IE5 (for mac) and IE6 (for windows under WINE) have not been promising at all. Before I go to the trouble of putting together a stripped down style sheet and style sheet switching to accommodate Microsoft's non-standard old browsers, I'd like to know if it's really necessary.

Thanks.

-JRS

Big Pipe Comes Home

Some landmarks simply must be noted.

When I was in my early 20s, while I was a grad student at CSU, Fort Collins, I was working for the housing and food services department. When I approached them for a second phone line to run my modem over, they pointed out that it would be much easier to run an ethernet line up to my room, which is what we did.

You have to realize this was 1992, when most dorm rooms didn't have ethernet, and when I was used to a 9600 baud modem. Suddenly I had 10mb/s 802.3 ethernet right to the back of my pc.

Today, with one phone call and a cable modem reboot, I finally exceeded that bandwidth. Comcast is now selling me 16mb/s, faster than the wire speed of 802.3 ethernet.

It bears noting that CSU's link to the public internet in those days was probably a T1, running at 1.544mb/s, but still. The wire speed to my computer now exceeds the fastest link I ever had. Only 17 years later.

I'm sure it will feel slow eventually, but right now it's mind blowing.

:)

-JRS

Smartpatch Technology, Revisited

One of the technologies that features prominently in both my novels thus far are smartpatches. These dispense a drug into the wearer's bloodstream at a specific dosage by measuring the concentration in the blood and dosing until a given concentration is reached. In Looking Glass, the smartpatch also listens to your vital signs for specific changes and only doses you at all when certain parameters are met, thus saving your life. Pretty neat? Well, I thought so. I did always imagine the smarts to be in the patch, not the drug molecules themselves.

So the nanoparticle smart drugs this article is talking about are, frankly, something altogether different than what I imagined, but they're doing some of the same things, and this kind of thing fascinates me. :)

-JRS

Another view of the post-United States

Friend Mike pointed me at this article, which recounts Igor Panarin's work on the possible fracturing of the United States. And Panarin seems to agree with the timeline I set for it in Looking Glass plus or minus a few years. Interestingly, though, Panarin is said to put the Eastern Seaboard states, the ones I assigned to the UCSA, as part of 'liberal Europe'. I think that ignores the great wealth of those areas, and the fact that there is a great deal of American military power centered in and around Washington DC. All the major wealth centers of the NorthEast are within a few days' drive or a couple weeks' march, and no nation which wished to survive would let them get away.

Also, hope y'all had a happy midwinter holiday of your preference, and have a happy New Year.

-JRS

NANOWRIMO - Wrapup

As you might have guessed from my lengthy silence, things got a bit hairy with Nano. I was two days behind for most of the campaign, only catching up the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, then taking Thanksgiving off. I finally finished Saturday, November 29, in the middle of the afternoon at the write-in at the Tattered Cover, Highlands Ranch.

And now, of course, I have the inevitable post-nano cold. It's getting better, but this is why I've been silent so long.

-JRS