Patty emailed me and solved the "why isn't anybody buying the Amazon ebook" question -- according to her, it's nearly impossible. She says they won't take a credit or debit card, you have to either have an Amazon gift card or that Amazon Prime crap.

So I don't know what to do. I'd just pull it and put it on the site for free like the other two books, but that would hardly be fair to the two people who jumped through Amazon's hoops.

Suggestions are very welcome.

hello

At an impasse with Voyage to Earth, I hacked out another short story today. Unfortunately, I wrote it in Open Office and slashdot refuses to preview properly; in preview it looks fine but when posted the smart quotes turn to garbage. So rather than pasting it here, I'll have to send you to somewhere less stupid.

I love Amazon reviews:

A review on a scale explains how (cheaper) scales provide repeatable numbers.

People love repeatable numbers. Consistency is more important than accuracy. Of course some get the two mixed up. But that's okay, as long as you get what you want.

(Cheap) bathroom scales are affected by slight differences in foot placement. Another scale compensates it otherwise. Other people just go for three consistent weightings.

Similar to the 80/20 Rule, perhaps, most people just want a decision made for them. Sure, we all know the numbers change, but which do i use? Three weightings? That's unscientific! Proximity to the last time? That's silliness! Yes, what if the manufacturer of the scale is willing to do just that for you? Finally, an accurate, consistent scale!

Currently, it has 12,639 out of 15,649 5-star reviews. That's ~80%. Who woulda thought?

I just added another title to my web site: H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. I hadn't realized that book was 8000 words short of being a novel.

It only took a day or so to fix up, but then it isn't a fat book like Huckleberry Finn, which has so many illustrations that I'm going to have to upgrade my space on the server (as if this hobby doesn't already cost too much). The Time Machine only has three pictures.

Speaking of Huck, like I mentioned, I hadn't read it in decades. I discovered on reading it that Sergy's kid did NOT, in fact, coin the word "Google". The word "Googling" is in chapter 29: "The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was up, but just went a goo-gooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that's googling out buttermilk; and as for the king, he just gazed and gazed down sorrowful on them new-comers like it give him the stomach-ache in his very heart to think there could be such frauds and rascals in the world."

Do you think that they'd have named it something else if they knew that "googling" had to do with lack of speed? I found it rather amusing.

You've probably noticed that the posted books I didn't wrire are referenced in the ones I did. I wish I could post Asimov's The End of Eternity.

I should get back to Mars Bars and Random Scribblings...

About six months or so ago I decided to take a break from writing and do some reading, so I pulled an Asimov collection from the shelf. After half a dozen or so stories, I thought I'd read something that wasn't science fiction. Huckleberry Finn was on my mind, and since my copy was somehow lost I decided to just read it on the web; I remembered it being a really good book, though I hadn't read it in decades.

All the online versions sucked; archive.org, gutenberg.org, the .EDUs, it didn't matter. All had extraneous bullshit and looked thrown together carelessly.

So I thought I'd assemble one that didn't suck; one with borders, a book font, proper justification, all the illustrations by the original illustrator, and put there with thought rather than <p><img src="illustration.jpg"><p>.

I see why the rest looked hastily thrown together; it was a hell of a lot of work. I've been at it full time for a couple of weeks, and although I've posted it at my web site there are still a few bugs.

If you decide to read some Twain and see some bugs, please let me know.

The book isn't really about Huck. It was about Jim. It was an abolitionist book about the horrors of slavery, written before the Civil War.

Folks were sure different back then.

I use my Fedora desktop to work on development of all kinds. I love that with a Linux machine I can have a machine that matches my production environment very nicely and all the tools I want are there and work pretty well together.

I appreciate SELinux since it is there to keep me safe.

But sometimes - it is a frigging pain. I'm messing about with Yii, a PHP framework and I kept running into problems with permissions. At first I thought it was regular permissions but quickly realized that wasn't it and google pointed me to SELinux. Apache can't write to stuff in /var/www/html.

I did lots of reading. I found one way to fix it, though that way quit working after I had to log out to get a change to a group setting to go into effect. And I read a lot more and it was hard to understand it all, confusing and finally I setenforce=0 and got to work.

I realize that this is a bad habit and I shouldn't do it - but I just need to finish stuff. I'd like a nice way to manage this. Any of you may feel free to make that happen.

http://www.etymonline.com/ this site has cause me more learning than any other site besides wikipedia. about time i started learning what the words really mean right right?

One of the funny (tragic?) things is that my son and I traveled to Paris and bought tons of bandes desinnees including ones by some of the cartoonists that were murdered by terrorists today.

I stand with them.

Your right to claim blasphemy ends when you set foot outside the mosque.

Leaving the office yesterday, i got in at the 6th floor. First it stopped at the 5th and a man got on. At the 4th floor, another man and woman entered. From there we went straight down the other 4 floors unabated.

Mr. 4th floor recognized Mr. 5th floor and they chatted. Moments before the gates to freedom something like this transpired:

Mr 4th floor: "Now off to the gym to say hello to all those 2015 resolutions."
Mr 5th floor: encourages him that he'll be able to keep them.
Mr 4th floor: "No, i have no problem with the gym. I mean all the other people."

For the last several years I've noticed Google's search results getting worse and worse as time went by. Ten years ago, typing the title of a work returned that work usually in the first spot. They now seem to completely ignore the "title" meta tags.

They've gradually reduced the number of things you could do to get to the document you're searching for. It used to be that if you searched for "no dog is a cat", all the search results would have that phrase in it, with documents having that as a title listed first. Now, searching for that phrase returns any page with any of those words. What damned good is that, if that exact phrase is what you're looking for? Apparently, Google now ignores quote marks.

I discovered this morning that that's not all it ignores now. Google has deteriorated to the point that the old Infoseek that Google took the search crown from was better.

It ignores not only quotes, but all punctuation and spaces. I searched for "Mars, Ho!" (including the quotes) and the first ten pages had results about people and things named "marsho". WHAT THE GOD DAMNED FUCK??? Why in the hell do the idiots think I put that comma, space, and exclamation point in for?

NASA has a "Mars, Ho!" page. Guess what? Google doesn't return it. At all. Google gives me millions of pages, none of which match my search criteria. I can almost see it not finding my insignifigant site, but a NASA page doesn't show up?

That's just pathetic.

What's even more pathetic is that its quality has deteriorated so much that Bing and Yahoo are now better at returning what you're actually searching for. Both NASA's "Mars, Ho!" page and mine are on the first page of both Bing and Yahoo's sites.

It was wrong of Firefox to just change peoples' default search, but I now see why they did it. They figured out before I did that Google jumped the shark quite a while ago and now is next to worthless.

It's that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash. I might as well, too. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year's final chapter).

Well, this one's starting out a little differently than previous ones. Is the whole damned internet down? It's Dec 17 right now and I was going to register the copyright for Mars, Ho! then work on his year's "Final Chapter". The copyright office is undergoing "emergency maintenance" and slashdot says "Slashdot is presently in offline mode. Only the front page and story pages linked from the front page are available in this mode. Please try again later" after Firefox warned me "It's a trap!"

As usual, first: the yearly index:

Journals:
the Paxil Diaries
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013

2014
A Pleasant Vacation
A Pretty Good Friday
A Yank Back to the Past
Get off Wierd Al's Lawn!
The Coldest Night
Scientist says white is black
I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas

Sci-Fi:
Nobots
Mars, Ho!
Moroned Off Vesta
Time flies like an error
Watch your language, young man!
Grommler
Some links go to Soylent, since they don't have slashdot's patented text mangler when you format something for a book and copy & paste to the journal.

Last years' stupid predictions:
100% accuracy!
Someone will die. Not necessarily anybody I know...
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won't make inroads in the US. I hope I'm wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I'll still be a nerd.
You'll still be a nerd.
technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot.
Slashdot will be rife with dupes.
Many FPs will be poorly edited.
I'll retire and/or die. Nailed it! I retired at the end of February.

I'll just keep the same list this year, except that the "retire or die" one (shudder) and replace it with "I'll publish Random Scribblings". That prediction may be a bit iffy.

Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

I am in the office today. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the building. So today I'm doing something I almost never do - I'm listening to music via my speakers rather than using my headphones.
 
When I kicked off Amarok I went to switch the audio from the headphones to the speakers and realized I hadn't installed pavucontrol. I pulled it up in apper and saw that it was a gtk program. Not a big deal in itself. I have other gtk stuff already installed. But it just made me think - KDE must have a way to do this itself. That got me looking at Kmix but I couldn't find anything that would let me switch the audio from one device to another. So I installed pavucontrol, started listening to my musics and thought, this is a situation that should be fixed.
 
It seems like if this were going to happen in KDE it should happen with Kmix. So I looked up the project and got ready to email the maintainer. Then I thought, "There must be a place to put feature requests." I ended up at the KDE bug database and that is when I decided to search and see if this was already something in work. Searching the database was a little tricky - but I did end up seeing a bug report for kmix crashing when a stream was moved to a different device.
 
So I went back to Kmix. Right clicking on a stream brings up a menu that includes "Move" and there it was. I'm glad it already does what I want. I just wish it was easier to know. The Kmix handbook doesn't mention it and opening the Mixer it still works the same way - there's no menu that does the same thing without right clicking on a stream. I have this fear of a future where I just go right clicking all over the ui of everything I use, looking for stuff I need.
 
I love KDE and appreciate all the work that goes into it. Shoot - maybe this is a chance for me to contribute something. This is the kind of easy thing I could probably figure out. Anyway this is a note to myself for when I forget later. Plus it might help someone else.
 
On an unrelated note - when I hear Lorde's Royals - I can't help but hear the Weird Al version. He really nailed that one.

It isn't supposed to be. I'll get to that later, but first, please download the Amazon e-book! It's only two bucks and I'd really like to see my name on a best seller list.

Speaking of names, the dufuses at Amazon insist on a first name. At least they left it lowercase.

As to its early release, I'm not sure what happened but I wanted to have perfect hard copies in my hand first, but I won't for another week. Not sure what happened, probably my own fault. If one of the covers is borked that's a $25 ISBN up in smoke. I can only hope.

As always, PDF and HTML is free. I'm only charging for the ebook because Amazon insists, and maybe it will get more exposure. I write these things to be read, after all, not for money. Good thing, too...

The free files and links to sales are here.

If you're thinking "hey, I already read that book, right here," well, no, you didn't. What's posted here is 2/3rds as long, and much of that was removed. If you can't afford two bucks, well, you can still read it for free.

I run a Vbox instance of Fedora on my mac. It was Fedora 20 but I used Fedup to upgrade it to Fedora 21.
 
When I did that and updated everything I ran into a problem where guest additions wasn't working. And I don't know about other situations but in this one when Guest Additions isn't working then the VM is pretty much unusable. So I was digging around trying to figure it out. The install would run and complain about not being able to find the kernel headers but they were installed. Along with all other necessary packages.
 
I found a note where someone realized that using a debug kernel was there issue. I'd seen that listed as a kernel option when I'd booted - I'd never noticed it before but I didn't really think about it. So when I rebooted I just chose the kernel that didn't list -debug and then everything worked. I'm not sure just what's going on and I need to look into getting it so that the right kernel is automatically chosen every time, rather than my having to manually choose it. But at least it works now.