Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Yesterday was a day of rest after the crawfish party.
Late in the afternoon, the girls and I took the train downtown to a meetup for people from #joiito IRC channel. The meetup was at Phillipe’s: Home of the French Dip, one of my favorite places in LA.

The meetup wasn’t very big, just Grant and his girlfriend Jill showed up. I had met Grant in San Diego at ETech and it was good to see him again. As Grant mentions, it was more like dinner with a friend than a meetup, but fun none the less. My girls had a great time.

Mira, Zoe, Jill, and Grant
Gaming
A number of people have commented on the picture of the girls playing the Battlefield Vietnam. Well, they are well rounded gamers. Here is Zoe playing a Barbie video game where they get to give virtual makeovers. At one point I looked over and the had put a mud mask on the face and cucumbers on the eyes.

Go, go, girl gamers!

Yesterday was the Annual Crawfish Party at Len & Monique’s house. In addition to cooking and eating somewhere around 200 pounds of crawfish, it was Kate Perruzi’s 4th birthday too.

You can see all the photos in the Crawfish 2004 Gallery

I switched Michele over to using TypePad instead of MovableType for her blog and finally I got the DNS issues resolved.
She’s been blogging on the road. Check out -> Scarymommy

I’ve been playing Battlefield Vietnam, the successor to Battlefield: 1942 for a little over a week now. I really enjoyed BF:1942, and have been looking forward to this game for quite a while.
A few screen shots:

SA-7 about to take out a helicopter.

The troops are choppered into a combat location.

Some people have difficulty mastering helicopter piloting.

In the game you can do everything flying jets, to planting land mines, to sniping, to driving a tank, to simply carrying an M-16. Overall it’s a great games with fairly good balance.
I’ve got a couple of gripes with the overpowered M60 machine gun and the underpowered anti-aircraft capabilities of infantry, but they’ll be fixed in upcoming patches.
I also have Unreal Tournament 2004, but I really haven’t played it much yet. All in good time.
The girls saw me practicing with a joystick, learning how to fly in the game and wanted to try. Who am I to deny my daughters wholesome gaming fun? Soon they were driving all the vehicles in the game and even flying the aircraft. The call it The Crashing Game since all they like to do is crash things.

I’m so proud they are turning out to be fine young gamers.
Lastly, since SXSW my arm has been hurting from too much computer usage. Since I spend all day at one and most of the evening at one, it gets little time to heal up. As a result, my forearm is a throbbing and even a handful of Advil wasn’t killing the pain.

So I broke down and got a brace. I can kinda type, but slowly. Moving a mouse it difficult. Looks like I just have to lay off the keyboard for a while. Maybe I’ll even *gasp* watch some TV.

Michele is out of town this week, so when I get home, I listen to the various phone messages people have left during the day.
When I get a message from one of my friends (read: another man), it usually is something like, “Dude, call me.”
Hearing the messages that are meant for Michele is an eye-opening experience. The messages are usually one to two minutes long and involved detailed explanations of some sort, that will inevitably be said again when Michele calls back.
I simply am amazed at the length and detailed nature of these messages that explain not only what they are calling about, but their motivation for calling and usually some extraneous topic tossed in for good measure.
Today I listened to call asking if Zoe wanted a playdate that went on a 90 second detour on why an extra helmet was needed during the overall 3 mintue call.
With women’s gift for verbosity, I’m surprised that all of our politicians aren’t women.

When I went off to SXSW I finished three books I had been reading.
For Us, The Living by Robert A. Heinlein
I saw this book and was startled. I have read every Heinlein book written and this was not one of them, until now… Evidently, Heinlein wrote this book in 1939, before he really began his successful writing career. The book has been missing and rarely talked about for years. Robert James, a Heinlein scholar, tracked down the book and got permission to get it published. Amazing story. Literally, there was one last manuscript in the world, unnoticed for almost 50 years, and he found it.
The book is not for general science fiction fans. The story is rather weak and has a few major holes. Heinlein fans on the other hand, will find it fascinating. This book, from 1939, basically lays out the world view that Heinlein expounds upon in his novels for the rest of his career. The novel is the genesis for most of his themes on personal liberty, sexual freedom, libertarianism, military service, and even information technology. His vision in this book carried his stories well into the 60s where he found widespead fame.
If you’ve never read Heinlein, this book is not for you. If you appreciate Heinlein, this book is worth the read.
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow
This is Cory’s second book and I devoured it in a couple of days. I really enjoyed his first book and was looking forward to this one. He doesn’t disappoint. Set a little over 15 years into the future, the novel touches on many interesting ideas like the world spanning tribes, communication technology, electronic currency, industrial sabotage, and even police methods.
But the book seems rushed. Not that I can point out a hole in the storyline, but everytime I wanted to know a little more about something, we were off to the rest of the story. The book zips through the story in record speed getting to the end and leaving the reader wanting to know more. I don’t know if was an editing decision or Cory’s own fast paced nature, but I was left wondering where they put all the extra stuff. Are the deeper explanations of tribes and their history stored in a folder on Cory’s laptop? If so, I want a copy…
I’m not asking for Cory to go Neal Stephenson style, but he should feel freer to expound upon his ideas and characters in the book. Perhaps his experience in writing short fiction is where this comes from, where you write to size and brevity matters.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book and you should go pick up a copy immediately. You’ll enjoy the book immensely. I just wanted a longer novel.
The Knight by Gene Wolfe
This is the first book in a new series by Gene Wolfe. I assume that since the subtitle is The Wizard Knight, Book 1 and it appears Book 2 is to follow.
This is a fantasy book that combine some elements from the traditional elf/giants/magic realm and mixes in a little ‘fish out of water’ story with (of course) the courageous hero.
Our hero appears in a new world by magic and doesn’t seem too concerned that he has left the modern world and been thrown into a magical land of monsters and adventure. He quickly becomes a player on the stage of this world and gets himself into all kinds of trouble.
Wolfe doesn’t bother with much of the Tolkeinesque order and cohesiveness. Sir Able simply falls in and out of Aelfworld and the reader is given little explanation as to what is really going on. Kinda like watching a movie and every 10 minutes you fast forward though 5 minutes, getting a flash of images, but not really understanding how we got to where we are.
The overall prose is great with the detailed scenes conjuring wonderful images and characters. The various characters encountered are great and look to be fun, ongoing presences in the ongoing storyline. Wolfe’s vision of how a Knight acts and behaves is an interesting take on the concept of the Hero Knight that has been written about for centuries.
I look forward to the next book in the series and will try not to let my desire for details and logic to derail my enjoyment of the book.

The LA Times website sucks.
I subscribe to the physical newspaper and read it daily. Today I read an article in the paper and wanted to send a link to it my brother.
Going the latimes.com site required me to login, as do many newspaper sites. I resent this, but logged in anyways. I was surprised to find that the article was hidden behind the pay only portion of the site. They wanted me to pay them money to get to a news article on the internet.
You know, fuck that.
It’s enough that I pay money for the physical paper. It’s enough that I log in to the site. It’s enough to endure the relentless ads on the site.
But it’s too much to pay for news on the web.
The LA Times people but have their heads buried way up their rear ends. Go check out Yahoo News or Google News. There’s no barrier to entry to get the news there.
I eagerly await the day when Yahoo or Google print me a customized newspaper nightly and drop it off at my house, replacing the old school and destined to fail LA Times. If I can get the NY Times at my house every morning before the LA Times arrives, I’m sure there’s a place for custom printed newspapers in the near future.
LA Times, wake up or you will find yourself going the way of the typewriter.

There are a number of anti-war protests going on today. I read this in a Yahoo News story:

In Cincinnati, several hundred people gathered in a downtown park to call for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Claire Mugavin, clad in a biohazard suit, pretended to look for weapons of mass destruction beneath benches and garbage cans.
“We figure they’re not in Iraq,” said the 24-year-old Cincinnati resident. “So we figured we’d come look for them in Fountain Square.”

Hilarious.

I’m a bonafide publisher now, and you can be one too.
A couple weeks ago, Cory Doctorow relicensed his book Down and out in the Magic Kingdom with the least restrictive Creative Commons license possible. Basically, I can take Cory’s book and do what ever I like with it as long as it’s non-commercial and I give Cory credit for writing the original book.
I got to think about what I could do and quickly realized that there wasn’t much I wanted to do with his book. I considered taking the text, reformatting it and publishing with the new instant book publishing systems. But I want Cory to make some money off of the book, so I dropped the idea.
In the shower one morning, I was pondering what book to read next. I had just finished my latest book and needed something different. The John Carter, Warlord of Mars series popped into my mind. I pondered re-reading it. But I didn’t have the books and would have to visit the library or buy the books. Then it hit me. The entire book series is in the Gutenberg Library online.
The Gutenberg Library is an online collection of FREE books that you can download and read. Truly amazing. Almost 10,000 books are available currently.
Then I knew what I wanted to do. I downloaded A Princess of Mars, the first book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Warlod of Mars series. It took me about 45 minutes to format the text into the right format and add a table of contents. Cafepress offers instant book printing and make it extremely easy to do. If you can make it into a PDF file, you can publish it. Within about an hour, I had everything uploaded to Cafepress and ordered a copy.
About 4 days later the book arrived, and I was amazed. It was a real book, like any paperback you could buy in the book store.

As you can see, I made a fairly plain cover graphic. Anything you can make into a jpeg file, you can make the cover, spine, and back of the book. I’m sure you creative types can do better.
Happy with results, I ordered more copies and they arrived promptly. I sent out a few to friends that like science fiction and gave out a couple at SXSW. Everyone seems quite impressed that it’s so easy to publish a book. The book is on sale at Cafepress for $13.15. There’s no markup, that’s the price Cafepress charges and I make no money.
Yes, you can buy the book for $6.50 new on Amazon, as long as it’s in print. That’s not the point.
The point is that the technology exists for no book to ever go out of print. As long a writer makes an electronic copy available, their book can be bought by readers and printed one at a time. For example, the book, NeoAddix by Jon Courtney Grimwood is out of print and I can’t find a used copy. The only copy I can find is in French. If he made the book available via instant book publishing, there would be no publishing costs until I agreed to pay the price he set for it.
I’ve got one copy of the book left. If you are a science fiction fan, and you want it, drop me a line. BTW, if you’ve got a copy of NeoAddix, name your price.

I get questions about Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Coca Cola, Dr. Slice, and Mr. Pibb all the time. For the record, here’s the deal.
Dr. Pepper is a separate company from Coca Cola and Pepsi.
Dr. Pepper makes agreements to bottle and sell Dr. Pepper in areas sometimes with Coca Cola and sometimes with Pepsi.
Mr. Pibb is a Coke product that is found in towns where Coke does not distribute Dr. Pepper.
Dr. Slice is a Pepsi product that is found in towns where Pepsi does not distribute Dr. Pepper.