No, not the whole blog thing. But I've moved on to a better blogging system. So...

CHECK OUT THE NEW, IMPROVED BLOG!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)

So we're moving. I've talked about that before. No worries, just a lot of freakin' work to be done around the holidays. Still, not going to let it ruin my holidays nor am I going to let it interfere in my plans.

Plans?

Yes. See, I've been looking to switch my blog over to a different software package. Serendipity is nice, but there are features it lacks and things that it doesn't do. I won't go into a list because, if you cared, you'd probably already be a semi-hardcore blogger and if you're a semi-hardcore blogger, you already know what Serendipity does and does not do.

How was that for a run on sentence?

So this blog will go static very soon. Indeed, I'm already working on the new setup. Feel free to check it out, but there's not too much there as of this post.

Now, if you do want to know something about the set up, hit the link. Otherwise, you may want to start digging on the new site. Same old stuff repackaged with a newer look! Really, it's like a Hollywood remake of a 1970s TV series!

So last night I can't sleep. This happens every so often and there's little I can do about it. I got up and wandered into the front room and jumped online. That's when it occurred to me that there were updates both for my blogging software and for the Gallery software. And I figured, hell, not like I'm doing anything, may as well upgrade them.

So I updated Serendipity, the CMS for my blog. Yeah yeah yeah, I know. Wordpress is better but really, I've used Wordpress and I kind of like how Serendipity does things. So while it's not the most powerful blogging software on the planet, it does happen to be the one I like. And the update went off without a hitch.

Then I did the same thing to Gallery, and apparently the update ate it.

Damn.

So parts of the Gallery are simply not there. See, I host my account at GoDaddy and they've got these free software installation services. That's how I got set up with Serendipity and Gallery in the first place. No telnet in to set up databases and that kind of thing. Just log in to GoDaddy, click a couple things, and you have goodies. The updates worked the same way, a button labeled "Click here to update!".

Now then, I do not blame GoDaddy for this. Mine is a Linux hosted account and sometimes your software goes bazoo no matter what the OS or what the software, especially when you're installing the shit on servers that aren't yours. So this isn't GoDaddy's fault nor is it anyone else's fault. And besides, other than the fact that the Gallery will be offline for a day or two, until I get some time to deal with it, nothing's lost. None of the stuff I uploaded lived online and only online. I've still got everything locally.

What I'll most likely do is uninstall the Gallery, reinstall it or something like it, and then re-upload the stuff. No big, just takes some time. And right now, I'm moving house. So time is something I don't have a huge amount of.

Don't fret, stuff will be back. Just know that the Gallery is currently out of order and things will be fixed soon. They just might have to wait until after I move in to my new place on the first of December.

Romance novel covers are a weird thing.

You see for years, decades actually, the covers of these novels depicted scantily clad females in the arms of either shirtless or fully dressed men. Now that makes plenty of sense when you're marketing something to women.

But only if those women happen to be lesbians.

Publishers finally wised up and realized that, if we're going to try and sell these things to heterosexual women, we should probably stick half naked males on the cover, no? Fine, dandy. But sometimes they get lazy. After all, imagery can be had for cheap and, once you have the rights to it, you can do whatever the hell you want with it.

Then again, sometimes they forget to remove things that shouldn't be there. Let me lay out a scenario for you.

You're going to be photographing some people for the cover of a romance novel. Given the plot of the novel, you realize that you'll need to have a man, a woman, and a boy because there's a boy involved in the story. Hm, you think, it's a period piece, one of those regency deals you expect. Funny, that means the boy is probably considered a bastard by the standards of that time. Now the man and the woman you get for the photo shoot are easy. They're paid for and they know what to do, where to stand, and how to act. The boy? He's paid for too, but the little fucker couldn't care less about being on the cover of a book.

So what to do? You can't yank his paycheque, maybe if you give him something else to play with. You dig around and... Oh look! Hot Wheels! The kid is crazy for Hot Wheels cars. So you hand him a couple of them. He smiles, takes them, and the shoot goes off without a hitch. You know that, as a professional romance cover photographer, you can always rely on the magic of Photoshop to remove the Hot Wheels cars he's holding in hands.

Then things get busy. Harlequin is on the phone and needs photos for 17 covers and Silhouette is e-mailing you asking for 12 new covers. So things get backed up and you forget about the Hot Wheels toy cars and you wind up with this cover.

Go ahead, click it for a bigger image where I circled the anachronism the Photoshopper forgot to remove.

Now, would you care to see a detailed image of the kid's hands?

If those aren't Hot Wheels cars in the age of regency, I don't know what they are.

Bruce Lee was good. No, that's not right. Bruce Lee was a legend. If there was ever a real, living, breathing epic person to ever stride the face of this planet, it was Mr. Lee Jun-fan. Everyone remembers that he was a powerful master of the martial arts. But few recall that the man was a scholar, a philosopher, and an award winning dancer.

Bruce was an expert with many weapons, but the one he's best known for are the nunchaku. So skilled was the man that we'll believe almost anything when it comes to Bruce Lee and a set of two sticks roped together. I came across the following commercial which will probably go viral if it hasn't already. It is, unfortunately, a fabrication. But I think it says something about us and how we perceive Lee.

The man was so good, and so high on his game, we will not hesitate to believe that he could play ping pong, against two people, and not bother with a paddle.

So I haven't been too spot on with the updates recently. It all has to do with the aforementioned move that we're working on. See the problem is not that we have too much stuff. I think our quantity of stuff is about right, especially after the yard sale my wife organized today. No the problem is that we have big stuff now.

When we moved out of the cell apartment and into a house, we had to acquire certain things because of the nature of living in a house. We needed a refrigerator, a washer and dryer, various and sundry appliances, and a big screen HDTV.

Well I suppose we didn't actually need the HDTV, but we sure as hell wanted one.

So now, instead of just moving the standard things that everyone has: clothes, dishes, food, etc, we now need to move a washer and dryer, a queen size bed, a crib, another queen size bed from the guest room, a twin bed, three dressers, a hutch, a dining room table, a media cabinet...

I mean, hell, I think we've got more big shit than we do little shit.

So I'll keep things rolling here as I can. But for now, most of my efforts are being redirected toward packing my crap. Please stand by for further developments and thanks for reading!

I've not been to an anime convention in some time. My friend John summed up anime conventions very succinctly with the words "The worst thing about fandom is the fans."

The last time I went to one, the so-called security was uptight because, well, they'd given a bunch of nerds and geeks some authority. It's usually an incredibly bad idea to bestow authority and grant "enforcement" privleges to people who have been disrespected their entire lives and who have never possessed an iota of authority. The fans, well, to put it mildly and bluntly, they stank. Seriously, they actually had an announcement during the opening ceremonies and in the convention guide that bathing is a good thing and you won't miss all that much if you take a few minutes out of each day to shower.

Dear readers, if they have to make an announcement like that, then I know I'm in some strange territory.

Finally, for most of it, I felt like a child molester on the prowl because I was in my early thirties and everyone else was a freakin' teenager. When I came across an incredibly hot girl dressed up as some kind of anime character, I didn't know whether or not I should feel guilty about thinking how sexy she looked. The problem is, when a young woman dresses up as an anime character, it becomes harder to tell how old they actually are. Chris Rock once said "If a woman tells you she's twenty and looks sixteen, she's twelve. If she tells you she's twenty-six and looks twenty-six, she's damn near forty." That especially holds true at anime conventions.

That said, someone who is of the proper age is probably really digging this little photo-op. Most especially, anyone of the proper age is really digging it if they happen to be standing to the left of the girl in white. Click the image for a bigger version if, of course, you are the proper age. Hell, click it if you aren't.

There are things that I don't agree with when it comes to Dr. Clifford Stoll.

That doesn't make him any less fascinating.

He's an astronomer and a computer expert. He's also one of the most dynamic and animated speakers on the face of the planet. He's sort of like Carl Sagan on cocaine. He's brilliant and he should be. He does, after all, teach college level physics to eighth graders.

Check him out:

Some people can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

Others have problems drinking and smoking.

More sexy randomness and other stuff over in my Image Junky album.

Back in the dark days of the internet, it must have been, what? 1998? Anyway the date is unimportant as what we're concerned with here is the content. And the content is a short cartoon about a guy who loves a book and orders a penis on the internet.

And now, another entry in the list of that which I would tap, sleep with, and invoke the wild kinky circus sex clause.

In this case, Lt. Uhura.

GawdDAMN Starfleet knew how dress female officers.

Unbeknown to some people, librarians are actually highly trained and skilled people who excel in the art of answering questions; any questions at all. See, we're skilled at finding information. We don't have to be experts in whatever field your question falls under. If you have a medical query, we can still get you an answer even though we're not MDs. Want to know something about finance? Well, we're not CPAs but we can still help.

And you know why that's important?

Because librarians wouldn't fuck up this damned bad.

You can see the growing collection of random stuff in my Image Junky album, that is, if you have an interest in lesbians and snowy forests.

To paraphrase Tenacious D:

This is not the greatest book in the world. This is just a tribute.

I like sci-fi and I like sex and I like Robert Heinlein. Funny thing about Heinlein is that he kind of started writing perverse sci-fi all of the sudden. Nothing bad, nothing incredibly explicit compared to today's standards, but still... wow.

Then they found he had a tumour pushing on some part of his brain. They removed it, and he got better.

Still, goddamn good pervy sci-fi. It did a lot to influence writers to come regardless of the tumour. So it was with a tad bit of glee when I found out that someone wrote a book as a sort of tribute/homage to the late Heinlein. One way or another, I will read this book. With a tad bit of luck, I'll get the library to order it. That way even more people can share in the fun!

Jack Black is kind of a big deal now. He's been in several movies to critical acclaim and you wouldn't even know that he's actually a fairly decent singer.

Indeed, one might have missed the fact that he got his big break through an HBO show all about his rock band, Tenacious D. The D was/is Black and his friend Kyle Gass. Now, not only can the both of them sing pretty well, Kyle happens to be a first rate guitarist. The show was pretty simple. Kyle and Jack would go through some kind story line. Usually the story was surreal and funny at the same time, like the adventure at Jesus Ranch.

But really, the story was not much more than an effort to get at the song about the story, which was usually better than the story. It just so happens that the Jesus Ranch story is one of my favourites and the song is crazy cool.

Ladies and gentlemen, Tenacious D.

Today my family became a statistic in a sagging and failing economy that seems to be everyone's fault except the bankers and the governmental administration that's inhabited the White House for the last eight years. Always remember, there's nothing so fucked up that a bunch of right wing, religious Republicans can't fuck up even worse.

Anyway, you've probably read stories in the paper or seen them in the news regarding renters forced out of their homes because landlords are defaulting on their house payments and losing the properties to foreclosure. So the tenants are forced out without any rights and, with luck, thirty days notice.

So guess what happened today?

A guy came around today to tape a notice on our front door. That was our way of finding out that our landlord is a fuckhead and hadn't paid the bank for the house in some time.

Thus, we're moving... and soon.

Thankfully we've already found a couple of places that we really like. The punch line is that we can actually get a better house for cheaper than what we're paying now. For a statistic, we're going to be okay. There are plenty of other people out there going through the same thing we are, but aren't lucky enough to find places so quickly.