End of the year reflectiveness

December 31st 2008 at 3:28 pm

Some end of the year ego fun:
Blood of the Muse has a ‘best of 2008‘ and has Pepper honorably mentioned as ‘Best Returning Character in a Novel,’ labels me ‘Most Improved Author’ and puts Sly Mongoose in for an honorable mention for ‘Most Surprising Novel’ and labels it with ‘Best Science Fiction Novel’ saying “could [...]

Master Chief lego

December 26th 2008 at 2:20 pm

Speaking of mum, this was one of her gifts to me this year, a Lego Master Chief. In his hand, a tiny copy of Halo: The Cole Protocol.

See, I am lucky

December 25th 2008 at 4:03 pm

Christmas dinner with my parents.

My mum is British, so we get some some non-American things that come with the dinner.
Christmas Crackers. No, these are not white folk that show up with your dinner, but small decorated tubes that you each grab a side of and pull, and out pops a small gimmick. Tonight I got [...]

It ain’t all that bad…

December 24th 2008 at 11:50 pm

Last Christmas Eve my sewer main backed up.
This year, the ice storm, wind, and rain has produced a leak in our year-old roof. Found that out early this evening.
Later this evening I tried to cheer myself up by booting up my Xbox console… to be greeted by the red ring of death, nothing seems to [...]

Got me some Borders love

December 22nd 2008 at 7:29 am

So if you remember my very long article about Borders not carrying my hardcovers (and my pointing out that they *did* carry my paperbacks, which many missed and assumed I was called for a Borders boycott or something until I got annoyed and posted a rebuttal), a little birdie emailed me that Borders just reordered [...]

Hat trick!

December 22nd 2008 at 2:23 am

One side effect of a pulmonary embolism is lung pain, which I’ve been dealing with all these three weeks. Today it got really bad, maybe egged on by the bitter arctic front cold we’re having when I breathed in the cold, cold outside air. It was painful enough I called for advice, and the clinic [...]

Acer Aspire One for sale: make an offer

December 21st 2008 at 1:43 am

***The offer is all sealed up now… thank you to everyone for their offers.***
My Acer Aspire One is a netbook that I like, don’t get me wrong. The Linpus Linux installed on it was easy to get up and running on, the 2 pounds make it almost invisible in my backpack, and the fast startup [...]

Cream soda

December 20th 2008 at 11:17 pm

I just had one of these tonight:

Everything should have real cane sugar in it…

Your weekend movie: Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

December 19th 2008 at 2:39 pm

For this weekend, I give you one of my favorite movies in the Guy Ritchie canon, and in the British gangster films canon.
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels features the misadventures of four East End chaps trying to figure out how to get ahead in life. This was Jason Statham as he can be directed, [...]

Winter walks and audio books

December 19th 2008 at 2:32 am

I’ve been trying to spark the habit of taking walks as a low impact, slow way of getting some health back. I took a couple small ones last week, and this week.
Thursday night’s walk was beautiful. Snow covered a lot of the ground, and I took both dogs with me. I bundled up, and started [...]