The other day I switch all my web sites from a shared hosting provider to VPS hosting at Linode. There are thousands of Linux VPS providers, the most famous of which is Rackspace because of all their television commercials, but within the developer community Slicehost (now a subsidiary of Rackspace)...
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...
As a writer, I am proud to say that I have used OpenOffice.org as my primary office suite for over 5 years, and could not be happier with it. While I must admit that Microsoft Office is a good office suite product, I rather dislike its user interface (the ribbon,...
In 1837, the engineering genius and great-grand-father of the computer, Charles Babbage, laid down the details of a marvelous mechanical computer that would have revolutionized the world and ushered in the computer age 100 years before its time… had anyone bothered to finance the visionary endeavor. Sadly, no one did,...
The United Nation is set to appoint Mrs. Mazlan Othman, the current Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (or UNOOSA), to serve as Earth’s official ambassador in the event of extraterrestrial contact. Until now, no one person had been designated for this task, and the exact...
Well, it looks like the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft is finally coming the big screen, as the movie script of At the Mountains of Madness is currently being passed around the Hollywood big wigs. Let’s just hope Hollywood can do it right… And if they don’t, I’ll call Yog-Sothoth...
I truly regret the fact that I’m going to miss Dragon*Con 2010, and the insufferable agony is only exacerbated by the fact that there will be a motley presence of fellow steampunk frea… I mean geeks… attending this year. From the release on Dragon*Con’s Daily Dragon: “Don’t miss “The Steampunk...
Clint Wolf of the Satellite Show rants about the “Scope Creep” of Steampunk, and I heartily agree. I’ve been noticing this gradual scope creep too, and it has tended to give me a bit of an uneasy feeling these past few years. There seems to be such a profusion of...
I have revised my essay on the Capitalization of Fantasy Race Names. With further consideration and additional research, I have determined that my original conclusion — that the race name should be treated as a proper noun — was wrong. Instead, fantasy race names are really common nouns, and in...
Wow. We all knew the launch of the Kepler Telescope would likely reveal a few interesting Earth-like planets that might be capable of harboring life. I don’t think anyone expect hundreds of Earth-like planet candidates to be discovered within a year of its operation. But no one, not even NASA,...
