Category: Essays

Just Another Day in Paradise

My wife and I (yes, I’m happily married now) recently returned from our week-long honeymoon in Hawai’i — the Big Island, that is. In short, the Big Island is a magnificent place to visit and quite an experience for someone who has never been to the tropics. This post is...

The Future of Total Multimedia Access

I have often wondered what it would be like to have any movie, any TV show, any documentary, any news broadcast, any historical footage, any sports event, any album, any song, any radio drama, and any thing at all of that or similar nature at my very beck and call....

Space… the Enterprising Frontier

It is now the year 2010. Looking back at my childhood, I recall how excited I was about this year. In the 1980s, the year 2010 was envision as the beginning of brilliant era of manned space exploration and scientific discovery. We would have numerous orbiting space stations, a permanent...

A Look Beyond the Window

Windowed user interfaces have remained the dominate, all-pervasive interface since the mid to late 1980s for all but the most specialized computer systems. Irreverently donated “WIMP” type interfaces (window, icon, menu, pointer), they are indeed versatile, flexible, and more-or-less intuitive, to say nothing of their 25+ year establishment as the...

It's better with Linux!

For a few months now, Microsoft and Asus have been running a FUD campaign against Linux. It’s not a big campaign by any measure, but just enough to be annoying (in much the same way that a yapping chihuahua is annoying). Ironically, until now Asus has been a big supporter...

Capitalization of Fantasy Race Names

I have struggled for some time with the conundrum of capitalization as it concerns the names of fantasy races. As a reader, I never paid the matter much thought; as a writer, the issue never seems to stop troubling me. If you are an avid fantasy reader, you may have...

The Persistently Pernicious Paradox of Publishing

While I have been writing for approximately 20 years, accumulating thousands of pages of written work, I am quite ashamed to say that I have never been published. And it has not been for the lack of trying. I have failed to have a single book published by any of...