Category: Uncategorized

A story I often tell whether teaching or whatever, is about a time when I couldn’t have been more than five.  Daddy had taken me onto The Base¹ to show me where he worked.

I remember two things very clearly about it.  He’d written a little program that would print out a punch card with my name on it.  That really impressed me, as did the banks and banks of machines with reel to reel tapes.  It looked so cool and futuristic to me even at five.

But he said something that really stuck with me.   He was explaining the computers, what they are, how they work (more or less) and commented that when I had children, I’d have a computer I could hold in my hand that would be much more powerful than tons and tons of metal sitting in that cold room with the tile floor.

At the time, I really thought he was pulling my leg.

Usually, I’m telling this story to my students in computer classes.  I then pull out my phone (a Palm Centro) and we all share a laugh.   I’d mentioned it in passing the other night and the man of the house laughed and asked me if that was why I’d wanted a netbook so badly, and why I’m fascinated with little, powerful bits of technology.

I expect that’s part of it.   But, I’m fascinated by compact usefulness in general, though.  I mean, I make Japanese-style bento.  I can fit my lunchbox in my hand!  The idea of having a wardrobe that’s interchangeable enough that I can pack a week’s worth of clothes in a carry-on fills me with glee.  I have fifty novels on my smartphone that I can read.  My dream home these days is a Tiny House.

But, yes, it would be fun to go back in time to that twentysomething young man with the little girl and say to her, “Nope, hon. He’s not blowing smoke.  You are gonna love the future of technology.”

---

¹There’s an R&D naval base on the Potomac where my father has spent a majority if his career.

My coffee maker is on the fritz again.  I can’t seem to get more than a few years out of even the most expensive model.  Clearly I must be doing something wrong.  Not everyone buys a new coffee maker every three years or less.  I’ve had the no-frills version (lasted the longest – five years before the burner broke), a fancy version that brewed into a thermal carafe (it could be counted on to overflow at an inconvenient time), expensive models with timers and all sorts of bells and whistles.

And then I have this cup-top brewer.  I think I paid a couple of bucks for it.  I know it was less than three, anyway.  It works Every. Single. Time.   There’s nothing to break.  If I want to make a cup of coffee for a friend who doesn’t prefer that her coffee be strong enough in which to stand a spoon, why, I can make her a cup her way.  It doesn’t take any longer to make a cup of coffee than a cup of tea, it’s fresh each time you make it and you’re not mindlessly drinking too much coffee because there’s a full pot around.  (Goddess of Java, I may be, but I have a human liver that shouldn’t be asked to absorb too many drugs too often).

I am so disgusted with coffee makers, I swear I think I am going to buy the ten cup version (which is still cheaper than almost any automatic coffee maker on the market) for those rare occasions when I need ten cups of coffee all at once.   For parties, I can pour it in my thermal pump pot and be done with it.

I spent a lovely day playing at riverspirit54‘s house yesterday.  She has the most beautiful spot by a narrow, shallow river with a broad sandy natural beach where we hang out, and  a rock cliff with trees clinging to various spots on the other.  From certain angles, it looks like something you’d see in Lord of the Rings for a close shot.  Beautiful.

You might get the slight impression that I like hanging out by water I can swim in.  A little hint here and there, maybe…  I’m a water baby.  I’ve taken vacations that did not revolve around water, and had a good time (especially if I was visiting a friend), but for the re-creation of my self, there needs to be water.  If it’s natural water, that’s so much the better.

Obviously I love to swim and go to some trouble to ensure that I do regularly.   And I don’t sneer at pools and chlorine and how awful the chemicals are.  When it’s that or nothing, I assure you a waterless life is not going to be my choice.  But, I prefer “real” water when I have the opportunity.

When I was a kid, we had a membership to a local pool.  Summer afternoons, except Wednesdays because we had a swim meet and were not permitted to tire ourselves out, were spent there from about noon until time to make dinner.  Daddy had a 16′ ski boat and on weekends, we’d be on Machodoc Creek¹ or the Potomac river skiing, having a picnic and generally playing on the water.  If we begged enough, Daddy would sometimes take us to one of a couple of dockside restaurants that served steamed crabs.  OM NOM NOM NOM.  Nuttin’ like a Maryland crab feast with hushpuppies.  That was rare.  The definition of a boat is “a hole in the water into which you pour money”, so the fun of the boat was meant to be the central fun.

A vacation meant water.  We’d go to The Rivah², or go with Nanny and Popie to Virginia Beach.  If we went to Disney World, we’d usually drive and stop for one day at a beach on the way.  We went to Nags Head a few times when I was young, and while from an objective point of view, it’s a better beach (wider, better waves, fewer people), Virginia Beach will probably always be The Beach in my heart.  Going down 44 (oops, that’s 264 now…) and waving to the bunny³ brings back really deep memories to me.

But each body of water has its personality and its moods.  It’s like getting to know a person, really.   Playing in a body of water, you feel the way the currents move differently at different times of the day or how it responds to the wind in the sky and the pull of the moon.  I think one of the reasons I love to play at riverspirit54‘s place so much is that her river (it’s always been her river to my family) has a powerful and soothing personality all its own.

---

¹A branch of the Potomac near Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare Center with nice, calm water that’s fantastic for skiing
²My aunt and uncle have a place on the mouth of the Potomac at the Chesapeake Bay. If you say you’re going down to The Rivah for the weekend to any real Richmonder, they’ll know you don’t mean the James

³When you get on 264 and head to the oceanfront, on the left there is a u-store-it place that has a bunny as a logo. In years past, the bunny had an animated waving arm. When my brother and I were very small and so excited we would almost pop about going to the beach, my parents would have us look for the bunny and wave to it. This year when Daddy was driving us down from Fredericksburg, I insisted that my children wave to the bunny. They thought I was messing with them, but Daddy backed me up that this was Serious Beach Tradition, so they did as I asked. I don’t think they truly believed I wasn’t messing with them until greendalek came down a few days later and mentioned that he, too, had waved to the bunny.

It’s going to be a slightly quiet day today.  After I bid on a couple of projects, I’m going to listen to The Secret Garden and clean the house.  The link is to a free audiobook, by the way.  It’s not a professional recording, but the reader is quite good for a layman.   A lot of the Librivox books are read by several different people and I often find that distracting, but this one has the same reader throughout.

Though sometimes the different readers can be fun.  The accent of the woman who reads the first chapter of Three Men and a Boat: To say nothing of the dog by Jerome K. Jerome is absolutely charming.  She’s Indian and still manages to get the flavor Victorian masculine humor across very well.  The whole book is very funny.  I read it because it was mentioned in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein. And he’s right about the pineapple scene.

I started getting Librivox downloads because I wanted to cut expenses and my Audible.com membership was an expense I figured it would be easy to cut. Basically, I was getting an audiobook a month for about fifteen bucks.  Which, I grant you, is cheap.  If you buy ’em in the store, they’re much more expensive.

I have close to 100 unabridged audiobooks. (I blame this on my mother.  She addicted me to being read to in the crib).   These days, I generally like to listen to something while I do chores I might not be enthused about.  Washing dishes is boring?  Hell, who cares?  I’m listening to a story!

My next listen is going to be Heart of the Hunter by a friend of mine, Sam Chupp. He’s a “real writer” in a way I’m not.  He’s been paid for fiction. (Sorry, unless you’re there, it’s hard to understand why this might seem like magic).

Maybe I oughta talk the man of the house into reading one of my novels as a podcast…

Last night my son and I came home from a party to find the police blocking an intersection in the driving rain.

When we took another route to the house, it became obvious why.  Downed power line.  That pole on the corner had been knocked down by the tree you see there falling.  That’s only a bit of it, as I didn’t get a pic before the majority of it was cleaned up.

As far as I am aware, no-one was hurt.  But power was off in our neighborhood for about 12 hours.  I slept in until 8, which is an incredible rarity for me.  I feel up to wrestling tigers, so I can only assume I needed it.

However, power was back on in time for me to talk to a client and get a couple of files to him.  If it hadn’t been on by 9:30, I would have had to have driven to another town to find a hot spot to check on email and the like so I could tie up the loose ends.  It’s amazing how dependent I am on electricity and Internet to work –even with a laptop and a web-enabled cell phone.

I felt bad for the linemen. Yeah, it’s their job and all, but it can’t be fun to be yanked out of bed to work all night.  I was just going to look for the camp stove to make them some coffee when the power came back on and they left.  Still, I’m glad they did work all night.  Prolly should send a nice letter to the power company.

I’m treating myself to a lazy day today.  I’ll do a little work, but nothing intense — just bidding and billing.  I’ll probably work on some fiction after I get my usual bidding done.  Maybe I’ll even do a little house decluttering in preparation for the next intense period.

When I was in the fourth grade, my reading book had two science fiction stories — “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury and “The Fun They Had” by Issac Asimov.

I’ve been thinking about the first story quite a bit lately, as it’s been raining so much.  I’m beginning to feel like the protagonist, who is slowly going crazy because of the rain.

But these two stories also trigger a thought.  How many people got into science fiction because of stories they read in school?  Probably few people older than I am, as the genre was considered beneath contempt by many educators before I started going to school.  In Stranger in a Strange Land, there’s this throw-away line about a character having read War of the Worlds in school, “same as everybody”.  When the book was first published, I am sure it was meant to be a least a little absurd. And yet, my fifth grade teacher, who read aloud to the class quite a bit, read A Wrinkle in Time to the class.  When I was in 10th grade, I was actually able to take a whole unit in spec-fic.  We read Dune, and A Canticle for Leibowitz (Hey, it was still the Cold War).  I’m trying to remember others, but I can’t.

If you’re over 35 or so, did you ever encounter science fiction as part of your school curriculum?

My household, when we moved to our present home, did not own a lawnmower.  The man of the house, who claimed the job of mowing the lawn as his, decided he wanted a push reel mower.  Me?

I figured this fell under the role of Designated Control Freak (or DCF).  He wanted to be The Mower of the Lawn, he could get whatever he wanted to accomplish the job.  It seemed a bit goofy to me, but since it wasn’t my problem, I didn’t figure I needed a say.

Well, it was a few years before I used it.  You see, it took that long before the lawn got too high for me to want to tolerate, so of course that made me the lawn DCF.  (The usual lawn DCF being in the throes of an insanely busy work schedule).  I hauled it out without much enthusiasm, but with great curiosity, as I’d never tried it before.  Since it was a gadget rather than a big, indimidating noisy machine like the snow blower, I figured it was worth a go.

I found out something.  Push reel mowers are fun!  They do make a low-level rattling noise, and there is an art to keeping the blades spinning to get the appropriate cut, but they’re more fun than the gas thing I occasionally used as a kid. (My theory is that like the man of the house here, my father liked mowing the lawn, so I was rarely asked to do it).

We got one mostly because they’re cheap to buy, they don’t use gas, so they’re cheap to use, and they’re not noisy.  While yes yes yes, they’re pretty environmentally sound, the choice was more about saving money than saving the environment.  Though as I often maintain, conservation and such is often the more economical way to go.

Sci Fi Channel Aims to Shed Geeky Image With New Name

‘Syfy’ Will Announce Name Change, Other Plans at Upfront

I would say that television executives are stupid, but ya know… They’re not.  Thing is, they tend to be very, very good at generating money in an incredibly competitive business.  We call them stupid because we say we want quality entertainment.  But when we don’t get it, we’re still often in front of that damned box, watching the ads and thinking we’re immune from buying the products.  I’m not going to give myself airs here. There is television I’ve followed, even though I tend to watch TV through Netflix DVDs these days.  I did get sucked into the new Doctor Who pretty quick and really enjoyed Firefly.  I’ve seen every episode of the Sopranos up to Season Six and every season of the X-Files through Season Three.  I followed Dark Angel and South Park pretty religiously when I had broadcast TV.   When we had TV as long as the History channel wasn’t running Yet Another WWII Documentary, chances were good I’d be watching it.  I think the only thing I ever watched on the SciFi channel was Andromeda.  That was on the SciFi channel, wasn’t it? Except for Andromeda, which I really did watch to oggle Keith Hamilton Cobb as Tyr, the rest of the shows had good writing in common (Well, Season II of Dark Angel was pretty bad).  I don’t think network executives take good writing into account for their market research.   Why should they?  The public hardly demands it!

But the point is, even I, who am not a huge fan of television in general, do watch shows produced for TV — albeit a few years late.  So, yeah, I’m  a consumer, too, even if I’m to cheap to pay for cable.   The point is, none of us have stopped consuming and our consumption patterns are such that the network executives might be making a smart call for the population at large — never mind we minority who eyeroll the change and don’t find the geek image a negative.  Many of us will still consume the product.

However, they did miss a rather salient point about science fiction when trying to remove themselves from the “geek” image.  Liking SF is almost the defining characteristic of a geek!

---

Thanks to patgund for pointing this article out.