So a few people have asked when they can read something I've written (from a fictional sense that is). I now have an answer - a plan shining in it's gleaming purity. Here's the deal - I'm currently editing and rewriting my NaNo novella, polishing it up to full book length and cleaning up some of the more hideous errors that were made. The first few chapters are now up to a point where I don't feel ashamed to look at them any more. I'm not going to post them here, among other things I don't want to actually put the manuscript under a Creative Commons license yet. But what I will do is release the chapters out to people who are willing to critique them. I'm going to make it a serial release project - I'm leaning towards one chapter a week, but I could be convinced to do one chapter every two weeks. If you're interested in reading it send me an email. The kicker is that I really want the feedback - so I'm not going to send you the following chapter until I get feedback on the current chapter :-) It doesn't have to be extensive, or great literary criticism - just a quick note on what you thought of the chapter and what you'd like to see more (or less) of. My current plan is to start it "officially" over E3 week - May 15th. What I would do is send the first chapter out slightly early so people who wanted to read it during E3 travel would have that option. Let me know what format you'd like - I have them in plain text, but I'll probably do a MS Word version, and could do PDF easily if there was interest. This will also serve as a spur to keep me moving through the story. Editing is painful, and I'm finding that I tend to procrastinate it. Having a deadline for getting the next chapter done will help me manage my time. :-) I've got a bit of a buffer in place - I'm wrapping up editing Chapter 4 now. But as we move further into the story I need to do more new scenes and heavier editing so I need to get a bit ahead of the game. The current outline has 18 chapters although that might collapse to 17 - I don't like the current ending and I might monkey that around a bit.

Sadly, that line isn't in the movie. We just got back from seeing Hitchhiker's. I quite enjoyed it, but many of the of zingy one liners are missing - the quotes that truly stand out from the book (or the radio series). My favorite scene (Majikthise and Vroomfondel) is entirely cut, but the essence of the story present. It's not the book and it's not the radio series, but it's as close to either one as they are to each other - and that's fair enough. JP, you may want to read the book before seeing the movie - you'll get more out of it that way. I was also curious - it was the first time I saw a film that wasn't entirely digital on a DLP projector. I've seen Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc, Final Fantasy, Attack of the Clones, and the Incredibles on DLP and thought it was well worth the extra effort for most of these. You might think that Attack of the Clones wouldn't count - but it was shot on digital HD cameras so no film grain present in the master. Final Fantasy is the odd one out here - they did an artificial film grain filter and it quite frankly looked poor on the DLP. It was obviously fake. HHGTG was a bit in-between the extremes. I can't recommend DLP enough for Pixar films - it just looks awesome. There was film grain on Hitchhiker's and it made the CG sequences not fit as seamlessly as they might have otherwise. But the dolphins in the intro looked great. Anyway, I'd recommend the movie - even at the outrageous price they charge. It's the first movie I've seen in the theater in 2005 and for good reason - $9.75 for a ticket is just outrageous. I know people who get upset about the profit margins on a $20 DVD, which I can understand but c'mon! how is $10 for a movie ticket to share space with the great unwashed any better? There were people there in bathrobes, and a few who brought towels. To those people I'd just like to say: I hate you. It's not Rocky Horror and I'd quite like it if you don't turn it into such. And a confidential note to the guy who made his girlfriend bring a towel, but she brought a small little hand-towel - that's your girlfriend's way of saying she's humoring you being a geek in public but you're making her feel like an idiot. Notice she didn't wear it out of the theater. Stupid thing to spend your brownie points, bro! In conclusion, I'd like to invite you all to stay off my lawn! (shakes fist). P.S. I also hate Chuji. Naturally.

Here are some photos proving that penguins have to walk through the airport metal detectors just like everyone else. Al-Qaida will not get a foothold in Antartica, not while America is watching! I have no information on exactly why the penguins were visiting in the first place. (I keep reading they were there to tour an Anheuser-Busch brewery - but that doesn't make any sense to me. What, did they find the golden ticket in their cans of Bud?)

I was looking at the online demo for "Monsters Menace America" - an upcoming game. The part that made me laugh was that it's a big Flash monstrosity and every time it switches section you get a loading screen with the standards progress bar. Underneath it says what percentage is complete. As I transition to the second section it briefly claims it as "NaN% complete" DAMN YOU ZERO AND YOUR TRICKY NON-DIVDING WAYS! (shakes fist) (If you didn't get this entry don't worry. Unless you're a programmer. That would be bad. To sum it up for the laypeople - there are certain numeric operations that make no sense - the resultant value is Not A Number - often written as NaN. The most common one is to attempt to divide by zero - you ask the computer "What is 7 divided by 0" and it says "Not a number". Yes explaining it does suck what (little) humor there was right away, but hey! This here is the educational portion of the show!)

So indeed my trusty sidekick checked out of AppleCare yesterday and appears to have a clean bill of health. I've been able to install and patch a few things that weren't working right - including the much maligned MSOffice patch that was the first thing I noticed wasn't working right. Pic_A_Day should resume shortly now that I have Photoshop back. In more comedy FedEx delivered the promised external drive that Apple sent me yesterday. (sigh) So now I have the 300 Gig drive I bought, and a 160 Gig drive they sent me. So we're awash in external storage here at Casa De Sanders. I installed Virtual PC last night - it took a while and I'm not sure what my impression is yet. Kool-Aid locked up once this morning while I was running VPC in the background (I was letting MTGO download images). I don't know that was VPC's fault but it's my guess. And VPC itself got SCREWED by it - the virtual FAT drive got borked. I'm installing iWork now.