Pluto was never not a planet
Henry and Ygraine doing what they do most of the day. (Ignore the messy floor, which I’ve TOTALLY PICKED UP since then.)
This fiber-optic connection kicks ass. That was a 153MB video straight from the iPhone, and it uploaded to YouTube in a minute or so. 50Mbps download speed is very nice, but 25Mbps on the upload makes a great many online tasks a great deal shorter.
We had a door put into the back wall of our garage. it has a doggy flap in it, so the dogs can get into the fenced-in yard from the garage without anyone having to let them out through the porch door.
It’s interesting to see the ability of the dogs to adjust to this new entry/exit after five years of being let out through the porch door exclusively. Henry is the smartest of the bunch–he figured it out in a few hours. The others sort of get confused every once in a while and seemingly forget the new door temporarily.
Ban, bless his pointy little head, is as dumb as a bucket of gravel. He just let himself out through the garage flap, but on his journey across the yard his little doggy brain has erased that locational information to reuse the storage capacity or something. Now he’s standing in front of the porch door and barking desperately to be let in. We’ll see how long it takes him to remember/discover the unobstructed door a hundred feet to his left that leads back into the warm house. I suspect I’ll have to get up and let him in by early afternoon so he doesn’t turn into a dogsicle.
Back from the shop: my well-worn Benchmade 2550 automatic folder.
A few months ago, the automatic opening feature turned itself off by way of the mainspring snapping in half. Due to the stupid-ass federal law on shipping switchblades across state lines, I couldn’t send it back to Benchmade to get fixed, so I tossed it into a drawer and forgot about it for a while. Then I mentioned it on Facebook one day, and thanks to reader and new friend Michael (who is a police officer and thereby authorized by Federal law to receive such dangerous contraband in the mail), the 2550 has been serviced and returned to my (entirely legal) possession.
The switchblade law is an example of what happens when people who don’t know anything about a subject craft a law on it, with only newspapers and movies as a source for information. The Switchblade Knife Act of 1958 was the result of some hand-wringing hysteria on the part of suburbanites who thought that “Blackboard Jungle” and “Rebel Without A Cause” were documentaries.
The following is from the Wikipedia entry on switchblades:
In 1950, an article titled The Toy That Kills appeared in the Women’s Home Companion, a widely read U.S. periodical of the day. The article sparked a storm of controversy and a nationwide campaign that would eventually result in state and federal laws criminalizing the importation, sale, and possession of automatic-opening knives. In the article, author Jack Harrison Pollack assured the reader that the growing switchblade “menace” could have deadly consequence “as any crook can tell you”.[17] Pollack, a former aide to Democratic Senator Harley M. Kilgore and a ghostwriter for then-Senator Harry S. Truman, had authored a series of magazine articles calling for new laws to address a variety of social ills. In The Toy That Kills, Pollack wrote that the switchblade was “Designed for violence, deadly as a revolver – that’s the switchblade, the ‘toy’ youngsters all over the country are taking up as a fad. Press the button on this new version of the pocketknife and the blade darts out like a snake’s tongue. Action against this killer should be taken now”.[
The state laws on knives are as byzantine as the state laws on firearms. A knife that’s legal for me in my home state to own and carry would make me an instant felon, were I to cross the border into MA with it and get pulled over and frisked. For some reason, I can be trusted to walk around in New Hampshire with a switchblade or a locking folder, but residents of Massachusetts would turn into homicidal delinquents if they did the same. And while NH has no restrictions of any sort on knife carry, the Federal act makes it illegal for switchblades to be shipped across a state line to anyone but a licensed dealer, police, or military.
I don’t blame Benchmade–they’re just following the pointless law. For what it’s worth, Benchmade service is really good. They fixed the spring, bent the pocket clip back into shape, and re-sharpened the knife, all at no cost save shipping. But it’s ludicrous that they can’t ship my own knife back to me directly, despite the fact that it’s 100% legal to own and carry in my home state, just because a bunch of stogie-smoking old white dudes got their bloomers in a wad after watching “West Side Story”.
Check out the 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards, and look at the Science Fiction category.
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2013?utm_source=twitter.com
The little Space Kablooie novel is in the opening round for Best Books of 2013. Pretty cool!
Happy goddamn Monday, kids!
There may or may not be a new novella of mine out on the Kindle. It may or may not be called “Measures of Absolution”. It may or may not be availabl…no. You know what? Forget that angle. This is private commerce, not the Obamacare website.
It’s called “Measures of Absolution”. It’s sixty-some pages of new story, told from over the shoulder of Andrew Grayson’s TA squad mate, Corporal Jackson, and it starts right in the middle of the epic clusterfuck that is the Battle of Detroit.
You can get it here:
And the best part is that it’ll cost you less than a donut and a coffee, which give entertainment for minutes. For the same price, this 64-page novella will give entertainment for tens of minutes, possibly even hour.
It’s a KDP Select title, so I can’t sell it directly or through another source, but you can read it on the Kindle reader for your OS. Because the file is DRM-free, you can also download it and covert it to a different format with Calibre.
Castle Frostbite just got a major Internet upgrade:
I opted for the 50Mbps down/25Mbps up package, and as you can see, Speedtest says we’re getting pretty close to that. Our DSL line was 1.5Mbps down/0.75Mbps up, so this is a significant jump in bandwidth.
And look at that latency. It’s a thing of beauty.
As you can see, young Lady Ygraine isn’t slowed down much by her pneumonia treatment.
So we got a new puppy:
That’s little Ygraine. She’s twelve weeks old, very sweet and fearlessly curious. Her first night at the Castle was as easy as you could wish for–she curled up in her crate and slept most of the night without a peep.
We got Ygraine as a companion for Henry, to continue Henry’s line once she is old enough. The other dogs like her just fine–the only issue with her presence is that Henry has already claimed her as “his”, and he’ll show aggression toward the other dogs when they try to play with her. Once the new and shiny has worn off young Ygraine, I’m sure we’ll establish equilibrium around here again.
Unfortunately, Ygraine is at the vet right now getting a nebulizer treatment and an antibiotics prescription for the pneumonia the breeder’s vet seems to have overlooked completely. We brought her home yesterday, and she had a fairly persistent cough. So we took her into the vet this morning, and he took an x-ray and diagnosed pneumonia. I’m not very pleased about that, to say the least. She’ll be fine after treatment, though, and she’s a sweet little girl who will fit in just fine here at the Castle Frostbite Novel Factory & Dachshund Kennel.
There are two issues with my name that pop up with astonishing regularity.
The first is the number of people who read my first name as “Markos”. I don’t know where they get that extra S at the end, but it happens a lot, and it’s genuinely puzzling to me. Is it because Marco is not a very common first name in the US, and that most of the wearers of that name spell it with a C? I suspect that a lot of people read Marko and have their brain’s autocomplete spit out Markos because that’s a somewhat common Greek name.
The second is the annoying reliability of someone saying “Polo” whenever some barista or fast food counter person calls out my first name to let me know my order is ready. 75% of the time, someone will go “POLO! Nyuk nyuk.” Fifty percent of the “Polo” people at least have the presence of mind to notice my pained smile and say something like “I bet you get that a lot.”
NO SIR, I’VE NEVER HEARD THAT ONE BEFORE AND OH MY GOD IT’S HILARIOUS.
I swear, it happens so often that I have started giving fake names to the counter people. I’ve even stopped using my Panera loyalty card because it puts my name right on the receipt and undermines my attempt to squeeze by as “Mark” or “Mike”.
I really need to get an easy-to-remember pen name with maybe some added stud cachet. Like “Thorn Magnum”, or “John Ringo”.
Did you know that I have rigged Amazon’s review system to sell my mediocre, derivative novel, and that I’m taking money from other authors that actually deserve those reviews and sales?
Yeah, that’s why the novella still isn’t finished. I spent all my writing time making seven hundred sock puppet accounts to game Amazon’s review system. Because, uh, PROFITZ?