Fraize Dotcom

Tomorrow is the first day of NaNoWriMo, and I’m terrified. I have what seems like a great story, but when faced with the enormity of 50,000 words, I get a little freaked out.

I’m itching to get started – I even threatened to stay up late tonight, so I could wait until the stroke of midnight so I could write my first paragraph. But, no. I’ll be good.

2 hours and 17 minutes to go. At least I have a ton of Hallowe’en candy to fuel my endeavor.

Fact: – The Army Field Manual printed by the US DoD does not list waterboarding as an approved technique for interrogation, and is therefore not permitted for detainees under DoD control.

Fact: – In 2005, the US Department of State recognized waterboarding as a form of torture in its examination of Tunisua’s human rights record.

Fact: – in 1947, a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano was tried and convicted of war crimes when he waterboarded a civilian American victim.

Fact: – In their January 21, 1968 issue, the Washington post published a photograph of American GIs waterboarding an enemy suspect in Da Nang. The soldier depicted in the photograph was court martialed and drummed out of the army.

Tell me, why is it suddenly okay now, when it was never okay before? What happened to our soul? Our moral superiority? I believe we are doomed as a people as long as we blithely traipse through life, ignorant of the horrors our government exercises in our names.

Shame on you if you don’t vote on Tuesday.

A big reason why I moved back to Virginia is – I missed the seasons. Central Texas has 4 seasons, sure, but Summer lasts 8 months, Spring and Fall last 6 weeks each, and Winter is 1 month. One day, leaves are on the trees, the next day they’re not. Of course, most trees in Austin don’t lose their leaves at all

Contrast that strongly with what happens to the hills of Virginia. See for yourself, here. Simply beautiful.

According to this site, Vegemite is now banned in the United States. The reason behind this enforcement is an obscure piece of legislation that dictates folate cannot appear in the ingredients list of your food product unless you’re a bread or cereal.

Attention British-type readers: Marmite contains folate. Stock up now.

I’m going to move Fraize Dotcom to another server. Yes, again.

My current host, DiscountASP is fine. They’ve treated me very well, however they’re not as flexible as they could be. They are a nice cheap host for Dot Net, but they don’t offer a lot of storage space or bandwidth. I don’t have very granular control over file and folder permissions, which results in my photo galleries being stored in the database. Because I have even less storage for databases, I can’t store all my photos online.

Now, my new host, Dreamhost, offers me 200 Gigabytes of storage and 2 Terabytes of bandwidth for less than half of what I pay. Yes – I said 200 gigs, and 2 terabytes. The drawback is it’s a Linux host that doesn’t do Dot Net.

Now, do I really need Dot Net? I need to learn Perl for work. All I do with Dot Net now is my blog, running in Community Server. It’s not a particularly good CMS for blogging. Skinning is really difficult… Now, Wordpress, which runs in PHP, is very simple. Thanks to my increased bandwidth and storage, I can put my photos anywhere.

If you want to see what the new blog looks like, check out the Fraizeblog on YouKlingonBastard.com.

Another weekend, and another Renaissance Festival visit. Yes, we love the ren-fest. Every week, there’s something new to do, or something new to add to the list to do the next visit. Next weekend is the last weekend of the festival, so yes – we’ll be going then again.

This time around, we watched another show of Hack and Slash, caught The Rogues, a fantastic bagpipe and drum group, three times! (Note: Hey, Texas visitors – they’re from Houston, and play at Scarborough Faire most years!) We also spent a lot of time at the White Hart pub, catching the final 3 shows, including the final sing-along. I can’t recall having so much fun at a Renaissance Festival! The songs were baudy, raucous, and infectious. I found myself humming the last song, The Wild Mountain Thyme during the walk to the car. When we got to the car, however, was when the real fun began…

Stay tuned for part 2… Trust me, you’ll want to see this…

It’s that time of year again – November is coming and that means 4 things: My birthday, Heather’s birthday, Thanksgiving, and Nano. Some of you may remember my attempt to write a novel – I didn’t finish it, but I did get about 10,000 words into it. I’m happy with what I did get written, but it was hardly a novel. Short-story length at best, and incomplete, but I like the story. A few of you got to read what I did and gave me great encouragement.

NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel, which equates to about 125 paperback book pages, but that’s still not bad at all. Heather was able to write more than 50,000 words in 2004 for her novel Reflections. It’s incomplete, but that project is very dear to her.

This year, I’m at it again. Unlike last time, I have very little idea what I’m going to write. I have a few simple plotlines, but not enough there for an entire novel. I shouldn’t plan too much – part of the technique for NaNo is to let the characters take the author to where they want to go. Just write, and the actors on paper will perform for you. That means I shouldn’t plan too much, but my mind has a hard time with that. I edit in my head as I’m writing which is also anathema to the project. I need to be willing to let the words flow off my fingers. Sigh.

So, I’ll need encouragement. I need to hack out 1667 words a day to make my goal. I wrote 700 words of last year’s story at a coffee shop on Sunday to get back into the swing of writing. NaNo starts on November 1st – I’ll post my progress here (assuming it’s good – nobody wants to crow how much they suck).

For the record, I fell for this, too. Still, it amazes me how many people are carrying this story who have it totally wrong.

According to several news sources, scientists have “transported” a hunk of matter 18 inches! Wow!

Except they didn’t transport anything. It’s bullshit. What they did was copy the quantum state of a cloud of cesium atoms, and apply it to another already existing cloud of cesium atoms. Essentially, they transmitted data about one object to another.

It’s amazing to me just how hopeful people are about Star Trek style transporter technology. Heather’s been bugging me for over a year now to finish my transporter prototype. The hour-and-a-half drive to the Renaissance Festival is a pain in the ass. Anyway, It’s fun to watch the hopeful reading of a rather boring science story turn into the brouhaha it’s become.

Fraize in a kilt.