I now have a nice Belkin stand for my iPad - it looks like a giant drafter's compass, which pleases me - and an Apple wireless keyboard. As I write this, I'm sitting in my backyard, enjoying the patio furniture that went in earlier this year, listening to music recommended to me by the always-handy Sean Collins, and just really feeling very ( Read more... )

There's some controversy in the sf world about Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, and about the defense of its author list mounted by Paul di Filippo. Angry Black Woman has the roundup, in her inimitable style, and it would be fair to say that di Filippo is not covering himself with glory on this one ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to cover some more topics, but got distracted by some other business. To work ( Read more... )

There's a new LiveJournal-based community, Fen of Color United (with the great acronym foc_u). Tomorrow they're having a consciousness-raising event, and I'll be posting one of their nifty banners in support. Today I want to write a little bit about how I see the general topic of race and its representation in genre fiction, including the science ( Read more... )

Some of you have heard me talk about, among other unfulfilled projects, "Noise", a story of uncertain length about someone running into an Internet flavor of electronic voice phenomena. I had the idea about a decade ago and have repeatedly tried without success to make it work.

Well, Twitter is the answer. Or rather Twitter and oakthorne together. A ( Read more... )

Today I snagged the 3.1 patch from a mirror site and applied it, just in case there are things I want to do by way of administrivia or whatever before my account runs out in June, then moved WoW onto my external "stay there until I put you on CDs or something" drive. Since then I've spent almost all day experimenting with rearrangements of my ( Read more... )

At the start of the week, I said I'd write up my thoughts about DEVONthink, a personal database sort of utility, and particularly about DEVONthink Pro Office, the version I ended up purchasing. (Here's their various editions and their features.) Executive summary: wow ( Read more... )

Confound you, viktor_haag . Your repeated mentions of DEVONthink got me thinking that when I'm in unfamiliar territory, I should avoid being hasty. So I went ahead and downloaded the trial version of DEVONthink Pro Office 2, and fired it up...

I'm not entirely sure that I will want to shell out for this. But I'm quite sure that I don't not want to. :) If I'm ( Read more... )

The computer one, that is, though I've got the physical one in my sights too. Stuff I'm experimenting with ( Read more... )

There's a lot to be said in favor of apps like Scrivener and Celtx that integrate the notes-taking and other stuff that accumulates around every long writing project (and many short ones). But I'm discovering that they don't actually help me write, because I get distracted by shoving things around, rearranging outline forms, and such ( Read more... )