I’m going to be testing an application called BlogJet that lets you post to multiple weblogs while working offline. Let’s see how this goes…
It looks as if the import of messages (though not comments) from Blogger to WordPress has gone OK. So now I can get on with other things, like refilling the fishpond (it’s clean now, thank Ghu) and finishing up the last work on chapter 3 of The Big Meow.
(Insert here a small restrained “yippee”, conditional on how fast the aspirin starts to work. Dealing with the plants around the pond has left me with a minor crick in the back.)
And railsnails and cogfrogs and other cool mechanicities. The artist is from Kazakhstan. (Thanks to BibliOdyssey for the link)
(I also love the index-page Flash animation. There are other witty and handsome animations on the site as well — from the front page, click on the figure with the top hat.)
For those who’re interested, another challenge grant has just gone up. A kindly donor has pledged $400 toward the completion of the Big Meow project…if subscribers / donors match it.
The last challenge was completed in something like three hours. Let’s see how long this one takes… (And to all of you who’ve already subscribed or donated, thanks again. Chapter Two of the book is running to schedule and — assuming that we hit this chapter’s subscription “break-even point” on time — will be available to the subscribers on April 3.)
I ran into this on Amazon this morning while adding something to a wishlist. Down at the bottom of a book’s listing you’ll find this data, harvested (I’d guess) from the “Look Inside” feature.
So I went immediately to find out what some of mine would have been. (Anything to put off a little longer the trauma of another wrestling match with the Big Meow mailing lists. Yes, we’re about to shake the can again: another challenge/matching grant will be turned loose shortly.)
From Wizards at War: otherspace pocket, spell diagram, dog biscuit box, royal sire, annoyed breath, transit circle, blaster fire, mobile weapon, giant bugs, manual functions, other wizards, pup tent
From The Book of Night with Moon: ehhif wizards, sixth claw, flirted her tail, malfunctioning gate, patent gate, neural inhibitor, lashed her tail, tenth life, stretched fore, other wizards, string structure, tail lashed, main concourse, young wizard, flea powder
Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses: fairy gold, residence tower (Sheesh, is that all??)
Must look into this further…
My favorite article from the Times this morning…
A free society survives partly because the powerful are mocked, and their pretensions undermined. Religions, which guard their own illusions carefully, are particularly ripe for satire. And they should be…
Orwell once remarked that one reason fascism never took off in Britain was because the sight of a goose-stepping soldier would prompt your average Englishman to giggle. Someone is now silencing the giggles. And our world is a lot creepier because of it.
Tags: cartoons, South Park
The subscribers saw it a week ago: now everybody else who’s interested can go take a look. Chapter One of “The Big Meow” is now online at:
http://www.the-big-meow.com/ch1/ChapterOneGateway.php
So far it’s only available in HTML and PDF formats. If anyone’s interested in seeing any other formats go up, let me know and I’ll see what we can do.
Meanwhile, have fun!
(And also, thanks and a tip of the virtual hat to the excellent Cory and Neil; and greetings to the many fellow readers of BoingBoing.net and Neil’s journal, who they’ve kindly sent in this direction.)
…BTW: one of the “extra goodies” for subscribers referred to at the website is going to be access to my research blogs. (Try to figure out what the writer’s going to do!) I use Onfolio to organize these. Onfolio is essentially a smart bookmarking tool; it allows you to save whole webpages (or just links to them) and is able to store them either in your own computer, or online, or both, so that you can access them via RSS, or just plain as weblogs, from wherever. This one, for A Wizard of Mars, would be typical:
http://www.owlsprings.com/marspublic2/
Obviously there are also ones I don’t make public. 🙂 (And probably a fair number of people hoping I’ll slip and post something sensitive to the non-sensitive ones. It could happen…)
He forwarded me this link this morning. Once again, tea all over the keyboard…
Stalin: hey hitler you dont fight me i dont fight u, cool?
Hitler[AoE]; sure whatever
Stalin: cool
deGaulle: **** Hitler rushed some1 help
Hitler[AoE]: lol byebye frenchy
Roosevelt: i dont got **** to help, sry
Churchill: wtf the luftwaffle is attacking me
Roosevelt: get antiair guns
Churchill: i cant afford them
benny-tow: u n00bs know what team talk is?
paTTon: stfu
Roosevelt: o yah hit the navajo button guys
Etc etc etc…
Stand them next to each other and see which one you like better. I know the one that I prefer. (And not just because the source was Irish, either.)
Quote 1:
“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection, and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type…”
Quote 2:
“Some men see things as they are and say why – I dream things that never were and say why not.”
Footnote: “…The $100 laptop [for developing countries] running on a free Linux operating system — not on Microsoft Windows — is being built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s media guru Nicholas Negroponte with support from Microsoft rival, search giant Google. …Some of the low-cost devices are expected to include a hand-cranked generator so that they can be charged-up in developing countries where electricity is often scarce. The generators are expected to yield about 10 minutes of computer use for each minute of cranking.
“…One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit organization created to further the cause of the $100 laptop, has said 5 million to 15 million units will be launched via pilot programs in China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand. The organization is expected to start rolling out the laptops in 2007.”
As someone who frequently indulges in pastimes like the writing of epic fantasy that involve the extinction of humanity (or various other important species), this button strikes something of a chord, as it deals with a slightly more challenging variation on the theme…
(snicker)
The whole website is one of those quiet labors of love that you sometimes stumble across on the Web. (like VillainSupply.com, now gone, alas…) Thanks and a tip of the hat to Fern at Spectator Mode, without whom I wouldn’t have found it.
(Just a quick note: Those of you who’ve been following the Big Meow situation may want to know that there’s a new challenge grant up and running now, courtesy of another [for the moment] mysterious donor who’s put up USD $1000 for other donors to meet. Details here at the Big Meow weblog.)
Meanwhile, I see that I’ve been tagged by Gerard at Presurfer. I’ve been fived!
The Five Things Tag
What were you doing ten years ago?
*Just coming back from our first Fasnacht in Switzerland. (We couldn’t make it this year, too much work pressure…annoying. Otherwise I’d be in Basel right this minute, sleeping off the Morgestraich.) Probably also writing the ST novel Intellivore and the Feline Wizards book The Book of Night with Moon, and finishing work on my final Spider-Man book.
What were you doing one year ago?
* March 6th of ’05…Blogging about the taxonomy of biscuits, apparently. (See, this is what blogging is good for….)
Five snacks you enjoy:
* Chocolate (in nearly any form, with a definite preference for Lindt bittersweet and the little hot praline waffles from what’s its face in Brugge)
* Wise potato chips (…enjoy them entirely too much, in fact. It’s probably a good thing I can’t get at them that often.)
* Goldfish crackers
* Pretzels
* Bacon rinds (of the Bac-N-Ets variety)
Five songs to which you know all the lyrics:
This is an area where I don’t particularly shine. However:
*”The Star-Spangled Banner” (having once very much impressed a bunch of sozzled Swiss soldiers with it: they asked me to teach it to them, as they really liked the high notes, at which they excelled. “It’s originally a drinking song,” I said. “It helps to be drunk.” Fortunately we were all most of the way there already…)
*Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”: but only in German
*The aria “Sempre libera” from the opera La Traviata
*The Oscar Meier Wiener Song
*The English-language version of “I’m A Pioneer” from the second season of Tenchi Muyo. (It’d make a great theme song for a “Young Wizards” TV series…)
Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:
* Dump a whole lot of that money onto various children’s, animal and cancer charities
* Buy houses in Leukerbad, Chur and Geneva, a townhouse in New York and an apartment in Paris, a hill house in LA, and a house in Ireland (you practically have to be a millionaire to do that these days…)
* Charter this boat for an entire summer of cruising the Med with an ever-changing crowd of friends (Protagonist 3 sleeps 11. We saw her in the harbor at Hydra some years back, and I fell in lurrrrrve with her. A big girl’s toy!)
* Buy a ticket on Virgin Galactic
* Take a year off to meditate
Five things you like doing:
* Gardening
* Eating out in a restaurant I’ve never been to before
* Watching TV with Peter
* Staring with thinly-disguised satisfaction at a finished book
* Sitting by the fire and watching it snow (cognac optional)
Five things you would never wear again:
* The fake chinchilla coat that was really soft and cozy and warm and made me look like a linebacker
* A student nurse’s cloak with the cross-straps across the front
* Come to think of it, a nurse’s cap. Starching those things is a nuisance
* A gym suit
* Shoes with pointy toes (I can’t wait for that fashion fad to go away. I hates it, my precioussss…)
Five favorite toys:
* My Sony Clié
* Ryoh-Ohki I…
* …and Ryoh-Ohki II, my Sharp laptops (even if I is still mostly dysfunctional due to having sake poured into the keyboard)
* My iPod
* My Nokia 6600
…And now I have to tag five other bloggers. Oh me…
And before I even made it out of bed.
In the inbox (because my Google address finally, inevitably I suppose, made it onto somebody’s mailing list):
“Compliments and Greetings. Please kindly allow me introduce myself. My names are Alan Backford, I am an accountant, by age 31 Years, graduate of the American Open University in Dubai, I am an English and I have returned to England for one reason; for the up bringing of my children in an English orientation. I was the head of the account department of a Private Bank in Netherlands and I would like to intimate you with certain facts that I believe would be of interest to you….”
Yeah, I just bet you would. Alan dear…let me intimate you with certain facts. (a) If you are “an English”, your school must be waaaaaaaay down the league tables. (b) The Powers that Be and I will be working fairly closely together in the coming weeks. So if you abruptly come down with a plague of boils, don’t be surprised. It’ll stop the minute you stop spamming.
(An “English orientation”? Is being English a lifestyle all of a sudden? I feel a Python sketch coming on. “Yeah, I went to this party…and somebody asked me if I, you know, wanted to try some tea…and then one of them took me out back and…and said, ”Ere, mate, come on, let’s play some cricket…'”)
Then, in the referral logs from EuropeanCuisines.com, this query to Google that brought someone to our site:
“What country does Swiss cheese come from”
Oh my gosh. And who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? (But later Peter pointed out to me that the most likely answer to this question is “America” — as, in Switzerland, the cheese with the big holes is Emmentaler. The Swiss themselves [oh, all right, the Raetii then, be that way] haven’t had a caseus Helveticus since Julius Caesar’s time. [And that was probably Sbrinz anyway.])
Well, I hope we were of some assistance with the question.
…And there was something else as well, but it’s slipped my mind at the moment, as it was jarred out of place by something cutting Siff’hah suddenly said to Arhu, and I had to stop and write that down.
It’s good to start the day laughing…
Tags: laughter, funny, Swiss, cheese, Emmental, Sbrinz, spam, stupid spam, cricket, lifestyle choice