New Author

I've found a new author to add to my favourites list. Michael Z. Williamson writes really good hard military scifi. Sort of a cross between John Ringo and David Drake. His first book is Freehold, the next is The Weapon.I think he may have co-written something with John Rongo as well. Naturally, as with the rest of the best military sci/fi, he's published by Baen's Books.

"Alternate" fuels need a new image

Marketing is one of those weird things that drives me nuts. On one hand, I managed to fail a stage one marketing paper twice in a row, largely 'cause I couldn't stomach the lectures. I blitzed the assignments, but failed the exams, largely through lack of jargon. But I know enough to see some of how Commodore computers managed to shot themselves in the foot. And LPG has got a reputation as a fuel for old folks, fussy about costs, and not interested in performance. Which is kind of crazy. Granted, it costs less, but its also very high octane, and really cold to boot. I don't get why it hasn't been promoted as a high performance option, esp with forced induction engines.
Well, maybe I'll get the chance to do it myself one day, and make a fortune of my own. :-)

Finally got gmail

According to what I've been reading online, there are loads of gmail accts for the asking, but when asked, google gave me their company line that its still in beta, only limited accts, etc.
Then I went to visit a friend the yesterday, and metioned my frustration while there. Not a problem, he sent me an invitation on the spot. So now I can be reached at brightmal@gmail.com.
And I can keep stuff independant from my own pc, and I can help nail some spammers. Until now my most reliable email acct has been chewie@falcon.sf.org.nz but it doesn't have an easy interface for reporting spam, which gmail does.

Rednecks and EML

In 'When The Devil Dances' John Ringo mentions the dangers of letting rednecks play with anti-matter. I've been having a look at the Wikipedia and the University of Texas CEM site, and I think rednecks playing with electromagnetic launchers are even more fun. I want a compulsator! Those things rock! A power storage/supply unit that can pump out multi-megajoule microsecond bursts of electrical power is just what I'd like in the back yard. And these Texans were producing these things in the late 80's. Now I just want that article about reactors which use billiardball-sized balls of graphite wrapped around 10,000 tiny granules of Uranium.
Give it a few years, and we could nuke-powered Abrams with counter-rotating compulsators on the turrent powering the 50mm flux concentrator gun. Now that would be cool.

Busted shoulder/Busted brain

I haven't posted anything here for a bit for a number of reasons, foremost of which is my back. Despite only being 34, I've managed to collect a fair number of irritating injuries. I strongly reccomend not spraining your back within a month of being hit by a bus. Needless to say, either can mess up your day, but both within a month of each other really sucks. So there I was, Monday afternoon, Linda had taken the little ones off to preschool and I decided to get some domestic stuff out of the way before sitting down in front of my computer. I had mopped the toilet, and just about finished the kitchen when I felt a twitch in my back just as my right arm reached full extension. No prob, I decided, I wasn't going to be doing anything strenuous for the rest of the day anyway. I finished up,and moved over to my PC. I was just browsing a tutorial about CSS and a couple of copies of Tuxmagazine, not even typing, when I had to stop, and go and sit down in my easy chair(thankyou, inlaws!). I felt like someone had put a wire loop between the point of my right shoulder and one of the vertebrain the middle of my back, and was ratcheting up the tension. By sitting in a really nice chair, I could slow down the tension increase, but not stop it.
Fortunately, when Linda got home, she was able to cart me off to the chiro and he fixed whatever had gone wrong in my back. Unfortunately, whatever it was did a fair bit of soft tissue damage, so I've been pretty thoroughly incapacitated for the last week. Even this much typing is pushing things, so I'll take a break soon.
The busted brain point has to do with CSS. Last week I was, among the nappy changing, bottle making, and fight stopping, getting my head around the similarities between nested frames and nested tables. I could problably do some of the structural stuff I wanted with tables within frames! Am I a genius or what! Then some lines from CSS tutorials and introductions started floating up to the surface of my mind. While I had to figure out frames before I could get my head around tables (finally), CSS apparently makes tables obsolete! Aaaarrgh! Tables had been bugging me for ages! I finally understand how I could use them, just to find they've been made redundant! I'm really gonna have to get my head around XML and CSS. That sucks. Ah well, no way around it, I guess.