Science Fiction Author of the JUMP 225 Trilogy
If you tried to visit my blog and/or my website this morning — or tried to read any of the feeds — you were likely greeted by a string of gibberish. (I mean, more gibberish than you usually find here.) If you were using an older browser or a browser with ludicrously bad security settings, you might have been directed to a series of IFRAMEs that led you to somewhere in the .ru domain. No, … Read more
The whole Anna Nicole Smith saga is so monumentally depressing that it’s hard to know where to begin. Why anyone would want to hold Marilyn Monroe’s sad, sad life up as an inspiration, I don’t know, unless her goal was to make Marilyn look less pathetic in comparison.
In case they weren’t working on enough already, Reuters reports that Google is working on the ability to instantly translate documents. Google’s essentially trying to do the whole thing through pattern recognition, which has some interesting philosophical implications.
I arrived back late last night from my trip to New York for the Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at the KGB Bar. Co-organizer Ellen Datlow was kind enough to post photos of the event on her Flickr account. The reading, I felt, went fabulous. At 40 people, the reading audience was both the largest and most attentive I’ve ever been in front of. I read my story “Mathralon,” which, as I told the audience, is … Read more
I’ve got a new part-time job, and along with that job came a brand-new Dell PC that came with Windows Vista Ultimate preinstalled. Here are my first impressions about the good and the bad.
Darryl Sharratt is the father of Justin Sharratt. Who is Justin Sharratt? Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt is one of the Marines accused of murdering civilians in Haditha, Iraq. Darryl Sharratt recently shared his feelings on the case in an interview with the right-wing website NewsMax. In that interview, I found this revealing quote: We have a constitutional amendment that separates church and state, but we need one that separates state and military. Regardless of the … Read more
Gmail should be a slam-dunk for Google. So why is it so irritating?
You may notice that something looks a different on this website today. It’s a new theme for the blog that I’ve been tinkering with for the past couple months. So after much fiddling around in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and WordPress, I’m ready to debut it to the world (though I might decide to revert back to the old one temporarily until I fix some of the kinks). Why a new theme? I wanted to make the … Read more
Inspired by an e-mail from my friend Matt Jarpe yesterday afternoon, I decided to extend this promotional kick I’ve been on further and discuss author blog promotional tactics. I know there are approximately 2.6 zillion gajillion posts out there on effective blogging, so feel free to transfer that grain of salt you were serving with my recent blog posts about book promotion to this one. This is just what’s worked for me; your mileage may … Read more
I’m about to hit a nice little landmark that I think is worth sharing: as of tomorrow, I’ve been blogging for exactly one year. Before I jumped onto the blogwagon, I was really quite skeptical about the entire concept. I had no idea what a trackback was, little clue about Technorati, and unsure why RSS feeds were so darned special. Even worse, I wasn’t quite sure I’d have enough to say to fill a blog … Read more