Andrew

I dragged out the telescope tonight, hoping to catch a good close-up of the Lunar eclipse. Unfortunately the (long dead) spider that had somehow managed to get inside the tube was stuck to the primary mirror and stubbornly resisted vacuuming! I thought that'd destroy the view, but it wasn't too bad. It was only when I tried higher magnifications that the moon looked like a blurry mess.

Anyhow, I grabbed the camera attachment and hooked up the old Nikon digital. I spent far too long outside in the 10 degree cold, but I did manage to capture at least one decent image:



More at the Flickr photo stream here.

Thankfully I seem to be thawing out now and all appendages are accounted for! Now I remember why I haven't been using the telescope lately. Brrrr....

Happy Australia Day! Down Under, now it's actually the day after, but better late than never, I say! The day itself is really self-explanatory, with the US equivalent being the 4th of July. I mentioned a bit more about the celebrations in an older entry. For most people there it's a long weekend, with a public holiday on Monday. We didn't have any special plans today though, other than staying warm indoors and keeping Jack amused. I suppose we could've paid a visit to the nearby Outback Steakhouse, but they probably wouldn't have known the significance of the day anyhow....

As I mentioned in a previous entry, last year was pretty ordinary writing-wise. I had hoped to enter 2008 with the usual New Year burst of productivity, but I ended up getting off to a slow start and I'm still yet to finish the first story of the year. I did manage to tidy-up and submit one written last year in time for the anthology deadline this month, so that's something. I'm working on a new story right now. This one holds promise, being about monkeys and assorted weirdness, although I did get stuck for a few days before I managed to unclog the mental logjam. The ending remains cloudy, so I'm hoping something will pop into my head before I write myself too far into a corner.

There's another interesting development on the writing front, but I shall remain tight-lipped until such time as I'm able to announce it here, assuming everything works out. I'm keeping my fingers crossed ;)

Now I'd better stop reading about Bonsai and really get stuck into the new yarn! These little trees have become quite a distraction since I received a plant for Christmas and reignited the old interest.

What I'm Reading:
The Ultimate Egoist: Volume I: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
The Bonsai Workshop, Herb Gustafson
The Secret Techniques of Bonsai, Masakuni Kawasumi II and Masakuni Kawasumi III

My Aussie horror tale, "Heavy Rains," is now online in episode #72 of Pseudopod :)

I guess now I can spill the beans! The online podcast magazine Pseudopod bought my Aussie horror tale, "Heavy Rains," to appear in a future issue.

In case you missed it, "Heavy Rains" first appeared last year in Spacesuits & Sixguns. Stay tuned :)

Since 2008 is rapidly approaching, I guess it's time for a quick look back at 2007. This year was even busier than last year, especially for travel, gardening, and watching baby Jack grow up into a little boy.

While I didn't accomplish anywhere near as much as I would've liked writing-wise, I was still pleased to see Heavy Rains appear online at Spacesuits & Sixguns and Trilo-Bites in Issue #17 of Beyond Centauri (my first print publication). I also recently sold a story to a popular online podcast magazine. I'll provide more details on that soon.

I read quite a few stories this year, but didn't read a complete issue of any one fiction mag. For short fiction the absolute stand-out would have to be Joe Hill's short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts. It's rare that you find a collection where every story is so well done. As for novels, I was very impressed by John Scalzi's Old Man's War and I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.

This year's stats are included below for the numerically inclined:

-----<>-----
2007 Stats:

2007 Word count:	11,426
Stories written:	2
Total submissions:	20
Total acceptances:	2
Total rejections:	22
Waiting for response:	1
Books read:	6
Fiction Mags/Chapbooks read:	0
Audiobooks:	13

Like last year I think I'll avoid setting any official resolutions, other than a simple "Write more."

Happy New Year!

What I'm Reading:
I Am Legend (& Other Stories), Richard Matheson
The Ultimate Egoist: Volume I: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon

Wow, the last few months have really flown by. Time for another recap entry! Among other things:

It was great having my dad and younger brother here. They spent 5 weeks with us, which seemed like it'd be a lot before they came, but by the time they were due to leave we were wishing they could've stayed longer. We visited Galena for a couple of days, got lost among the Iowa cornfields (who knew there was a place called Zwingle, Iowa?), gazed upon the mighty Mississippi, visited Lincoln Park Zoo at last, stayed in Petoskey MI, visited Mackinac Island, and travelled around the Michigan Upper Peninsula. The roof-rack came in very handy. My brother was quite taken with the new PC and spent many an hour blasting assorted monsters. They both finally got to meet Jack, and wished they could've taken him home with them. At some stage we'll have to visit Australia and give the little fella a tour of the land and catch up with friends and family. After their visit it took me several weeks to go through all the photos and burn DVDs of the videos we shot during their stay. It was a lot of effort, but I'm glad we've now got a record of their time here that we'll be able to show Jack in future years.

Jack has progressed from crawling to walking! He's been taking a few hesitant steps for months now, but in late November he finally started walking between furniture and now trundles all over the house. He seems to enjoy his newfound mobility. He certainly keeps them on their toes at daycare during the week, and he'll soon be moving to the big kids' room.

In early November I heard about a Walmart sale on HD DVD players, so I decided to poke around online and see what the prices on PC HD DVD drives were like. Since a HDTV is a long way off in our future and our PC is all setup for high-def, I figured a HD DVD drive would be the way to go to get an early taste of high-def movies. I was surprised to find a sale on XBox 360 HD DVD drives, which can also be used with a sufficiently powerful PC. The price wasn't bad, and it came with King Kong in the box, Heroes season 1, and a mail-in form for 5 free movies. How could I resist? Of course there's the raging HD format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray, but I figured it was too much of a bargain to pass up, even if HD DVD isn't declared the eventual winner. Since then I've added a few movies to the collection (Buy-One-Get-One at Amazon now), and I'm very impressed. I'm currently looking forward to the arrival of the 3 Bourne movies, along with the Blade Runner set.

Since my last update I've had little time for PC games, although I did sneak in a few hours of Portal. Quite a mind-twister, that one, and with a sinister background story to boot. If only I could figure out how to get past the security droids on level 16....

After some pestering from a friend Down Under, I joined the hordes at Facebook. On the plus side, it's got a nice interface, and I've caught up with some friends I'd lost contact with. As for minuses, it's an incredible time-waster, and it didn't take too long to get sick of the various animals and vampires thrown my way as part of the "Super-poke" feature. I tend to ignore these, so don't feel offended if you throw a cow at me and I don't respond in kind ;)

We're still watching The Sopranos on DVD, and season 3 does not disappoint. The Pine Barrens episode we just watched is a classic, and we're eager to see what happens in the final two episodes of the season. Thanks to Amazon's Black Friday sale, I picked up seasons 4 and 5 on DVD at a great price. Guess what we'll be doing this winter? :)

I wasn't too impressed with Spider-Man 3. We watched it last night, and while the effects were good, the movie itself was sort of meh! Knocked Up, on the other hand, was very good, and we also enjoyed 1408. The latter joins the canon of the few Stephen King movies that don't suck!

After finishing Joe Hill's collection, 20th Century Ghosts, I grabbed John Scalzi's Old Man's War from the pile. I've only read the first few chapters, but I'm really enjoying it so far. I've got a feeling this one's destined to become a classic, if it isn't considered one already.

I finished up with gardening back in November, and now everything is buried beneath 7 inches of snow. In addition to tearing out most of the remaining veggies and planting winter cover crops, I pruned the roses and prepared them for winter by covering them with straw and topsoil. We're eating the last few tomatoes from the harvest before going back to the bland store-bought variety. Carrie gave me a Bonsai as an early Christmas present, so I dragged out the grow-lights and I've been tending that now and then this week. Hopefully the cat won't destroy this one like he did the last one in 2005! Pretty soon I'll have to get the veggies for next year started in the basement, so that ought to keep me busy. While I'm at it, maybe I'll pick up some more seed-pods for the AeroGarden and grow some lettuce or something indoors like I did last winter.

Again, my fiction output has been non-existent, but I do have some good news to announce regarding the podcasting of one of my stories! I'll post more details once all the paperwork is taken care of.

I think that's about it for now. So how have you been keeping yourself amused lately?

Here are the garden photos from November. That's probably it until next year!
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More at the Flickr photo stream here.

Here's a selection of garden photos from October:
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More at the Flickr photo stream here.

Jack spent most of his Halloween as a kangaroo:



However, this transmogrification was not to last, and some time before midnight he turned back into a small boy....

More on the Flickr photo stream here.

We've had another busy month! Before the details, here's a selection of garden photos from September:
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More on the Flickr photo stream here.

We've been busy, busy, busy lately. Among other things:

- My dad and younger brother will be arriving this weekend to spend some time with us. It has been over 2 years since we've seen them, and I was shocked to see recent photos of the little brother I remembered now as a teenager! My mum was supposed to be here too, but unfortunately she won't be able to make it due to medical issues. This makes us very sad :(

- Jack has been crawling for the last few months! While this is exciting and cool, it also makes us nervous. They get into everything at this age! Not long now and he'll be walking....

- We recently bought a Yakima roof-rack and cargo box for our car, which will be very useful when travelling and lugging around all sorts of baby stuff. This will also hopefully save us from having to take both cars on our various vacations when my dad and brother are here.

- After spotting a Dell sale on their 24-inch LCD monitor (2407WFP-HC) about a month ago, I decided to order one. I've been very impressed! There's a lot more screen real-estate now, making it ideal for our high-def video editing, photo viewing, games, and so forth. I was initially disappointed the monitor had 2 dead pixels, but they honestly haven't bothered us.

- I've played a bit of the new PC game, Bioshock, and it's incredible. Not only are the graphics and sound top-notch, but the setting and characters are truly eerie. I only wish I had more free time to play it!

- Not wanting to waste the processing power of the new PC, I've had it grinding away at SETI@Home in the background, looking for alien signals :P Between our quad-core desktop and dual-core laptop, the number of work units is really racking up.

- We've caught the Sopranos bug. After reading about the series finale, I became curious and decided to order the first season on DVD to see what all the fuss was about. Since then we've become Sopranos addicts, devouring the first two seasons and eager for more.

- Hot Fuzz is hilarious. I think I might've even enjoyed it more than Shaun of the Dead.

- I've been reading Joe Hill's short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, and I must say I'm very impressed. I haven't been so entertained by a short story collection in a long time. Now I'm really looking forward to reading his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box.

- I patched and painted our garage door recently, and it looks so much better now than the peeling mess it had become. Carrie's dad was a great help turning around the bottom panel. The outer side was starting to disintegrate along the bottom, and it was full of dents and peeling paint. Hopefully it'll last us a few more years yet before we have to replace the whole thing.

- The veggie garden continues to keep us in tomatoes and peppers. Alas, the cucumbers finished recently, but we still have zucchini, potatoes, carrots, brussels sprouts, and broccoli to look forward to. There haven't been so many garden photos this month, since much of it isn't quite as colourful as it was in prior months.

- Unfortunately my fiction writing output has suffered greatly of late. This is partly due to lack of time and partly due to lack of motivation. Lately I've been reassessing exactly what I want out of it and what direction to take it in future. It doesn't seem quite as fun as it once was--or maybe I'm forgetting how much hard work it is between the fun parts. Thankfully the itch to write is still there!

I think I've missed a few dozen things, but that'll do for now. So what have you been doing lately?

I've been listening to an audiobook version of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls over the last week, and I found it interesting that the protagonist bears the same name (or pseudonym, anyway) as a popular fantasy author. This came as a bit of a shock on this morning's commute as I fired up the old iPod.

Although I haven't read any of Robert Jordan's books, I've heard they're decent yarns, and it's disappointing that he lost his battle against that terrible disease and wasn't able to finish the last book. I guess that's one of the risks of writing a long series of books. Circa 1999, I was worried that Stephen King would never finish his epic Dark Tower series, but now that the final volume is sitting on the shelf, I still haven't gotten around to reading it. Maybe after I've finished reading Joe Hill's excellent short story collection?

Here's a selection of garden photos from August:
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More on the Flickr photo stream here.

I'm still catching up! Here's a selection of garden photos from July:
( Read more... )
More on the Flickr photo stream here.

I've been meaning to post some more photos from the garden, so here's a selection from June:
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The rest are at my Flickr photo stream here.

After valiantly struggling for the past year, our old PC finally carked it back in June. I'd already put a new CPU in and crossed my fingers, but that only worked for so long. Luckily I was able to extract all the data off the old hard-drive using an external USB drive enclosure hooked up to the laptop. We managed for awhile with the laptop, but after reading about some Intel CPU price-drops coming, I decided the time was right to build a new rig. Although I'd built our old one, things had changed so much since 2003 that I had to do a lot of research to figure out the current state of PC technology.

Research complete, I decided on the following components:

* Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit (to allow me to use 4GB+ of RAM; the 32-bit versions of XP and Vista are unable to use more than 3GB, and possibly not even that depending on how much memory the video card has).
* Intel Core 2 Q6600 2.4GHz (quad-core CPU; I got the older B3 stepping model)
* ASUS P5K Deluxe / WiFi-AP Motherboard
* Antec 900 Case
* Corsair 620HX modular power supply (620W)
* 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 (PC2-6400) RAM (4 x 1GB sticks, CAS4 timings)
* Zalman CNPS9500 LED heatsink + cooling fan (cools way better than the stock Intel fan + heatsink)
* Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA hard-drive
* EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS Superclocked 640MB PCI-Express video card
* No soundcard (onboard motherboard sound is pretty good)
* Samsung SH-S183L SATA 18X DVD burner

I picked the components to optimize for running the latest games and high-def video editing, since even our fairly zippy year-old laptop struggles with such things. This is way more than you'd need for basic word-processing and spreadsheets!

I had all the parts aside from the CPU on July 28, so I put together what I had and installed the CPU and heatsink/fan when the CPU arrived on the 30th. Unlike the last PC, this one booted up perfectly first time, and before too long I was loading Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and downloading drivers. Vista runs very well on this PC, as do Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, which are the only games I have at this point that remotely stretch its capabilities. At the moment I'd have to say I'm squandering the power of this thing until I can get a 24" LCD monitor. The videocard doesn't really come into its own until you hit really high resolutions (say 1920x1200), and high-def video still has to be shrunk down to fit on our old CRT display. It's still cool being able to set all the sliders in games to maximum detail, though ;)

Thus far the only problem I've encountered is I can't find any Vista 64-bit scanner drivers. Carn Canon, get your act together!

Here's a photo of the new PC in action:


More at the Flickr photo stream here.

I bought the Civilization 4 gold edition last week and I'm happy to report it's even more addictive than the previous one ;) At some point I should see about installing some grid computing clients and contribute to efforts to cure cancer or search for aliens. I'm a little wary though, because our old PC was busy crunching numbers for several of these projects almost non-stop, and I'm wondering if that led to its eventual heat-related demise....

I'd say this is a pretty good likeness!

This horror brought to you by SimpsonizeMe :)

My Aussie Bunyip tale, "Heavy Rains," is now online in issue 3 of Spacesuits & Sixguns :)

My short story, "Trilo-Bites," is now available in the July issue (#17) of the print magazine for younger readers, Beyond Centauri :)