View 708 Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I am reading Lucifer’s Hammer over for proper formatting to get up a better edition of it for Kindle and other devices. That is eating my time, and I had to get a haircut and do some other errands today. It was cold out this morning making our morning walk a bit more strenuous (although Sable finds that delightful; colder the better for her. She acts like a puppy.)

The problem with the formatting is that Lucifer’s Hammer is a multi-viewpoint novel, and there must be a distinct way to show the reader that the viewpoint has changed, else the reader will be confused and have to think about the book as a book rather than as a story the reader is immersed in. That is Not Good. We did that with ornaments, spacing, and other such. On some Kindle apps on some devices such as my PC, a lot of the extra line spaces vanish, so you have a page that seems to be taking place in Burbank and suddenly you are in the next paragraph on Mount Prophet Elias on Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea. That makes you stop reading to figure out what is going on, and I don’t want you to do that.

We’re fixing these things.

The news tonight is going to be about a bunch of Marine urinating on dead Taliban. I don’t have time to do a long essay on this, but some things are pretty clear. First, they allowed a comrade to tape this, and he put it up on a social medium, and it got loose. Is anyone here astonished? Which says several things about these particular Marines.

First, they won their battle. It’s them that’s doing the urinating, not being urinated on. Urinating on the enemy is a practice of war from at least 3,000 years ago, and probably a lot longer. It’s better to be the guy letting fly than the recipient. When you send young men into combat and they win this is what happens.

Second, none of these guys is ready for promotion to any kind of command NCO level. They may be good as combat leaders and may not – they did win this fight, after all – but they don’t think through enough. This hands the Taliban a bit of a propaganda device, but then we have plenty of tapes the Taliban made about themselves.

Third, this is a Marine matter, and if it were left to me I’d leave it to the Company Commander. That’s what company grade officers are for. There will be howls from the media, of course. It’s a free country. Of course it’s free because we have troopers like these.

And fourth, if nobody else wants them, in the extremely unlikely event that they post me to a combat command over there, I’ll take them. They look like good troops to me.

View 708 Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Still working on other stuff.

The New Hampshire election had no real surprises, although Romney did manage to get well above the 30% limit that has plagued him. More on this another time.

CES is going on and there is a spate of material on that, so you have got plenty to read about. And thanks for all the mail about TWIT. <http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech/335>

I’ll try to do a real essay tomorrow.

I’ve been proof reading a new eBook version of Lucifer’s Hammer, and thus have had to read it over again. It’s still one heck of a book. Considering that it was written during the Cold War and still has the USSR in it, the story still holds up very well indeed. I keep getting caught up in the story. It read well on a Kindle. http://www.amazon.com/Lucifers-Hammer-ebook/dp/B004478DOU

View 708 Monday, January 09, 2012

We did a TWIT yesterday, which you might find interesting. Everyone but me is off to CES. I’m staying behind to try to get some work done.

<http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech/335>

More later.

View 708 Saturday, January 07, 2012

It’s late and I have sort of taken the weekend off, but I did watch the Republican debate in New Hampshire.

Nothing spectacular; George Stephanopoulos performed as expected, interrupting the candidates and badgering them as they attempted to answer hostile questions, and in general trying to get them to bash each other and not the Democrats. Newt was less testy than I had expected; apparently he has thought about giving vent to pure negativism, and Romney’s defense, that he is a capitalist and capitalism is supposedly the conservative side of the debate with the President, is so manifestly true that it seems to have chilled some of Newt’s ardor. I do not like to hear the Republican candidates bash each other; I would rather see them compete by talking about what they would do. Some did.

Ron Paul was consistent.

Michelle Bachman was missed.