Go look -- I got mentioned in a blog... and it has nothing to do with frogs. This Cision site tracks the comings and goings of tech journalists (not to mention the comings and goings of their respective media homes) and I got a post all to myself this week under the very accurate title Griffith jumps from Wi-Fi Planet to PC Mag. They even got the details of my past right, so must be someone slipped them a copy of my resume.

Only five working days left in the old job, and 17 full days until the new...

So, this is no secret to at least four out of the six people who regularly read this blog, but here's the big news, the biggest news to hit since I got an agent, and arguably the biggest news in my life in five years.... I got a new job.

My days as the "cellar dweller" (as my brother and father-in-law once jokingly referred to me... I don't let them get together often) are not over, however. I will still be working from home, still at the same desk, surrounded by the same dogs.

I'm moving from my job editing a Web site to writing for a magazine. Not just any magazine: PC Magazine. It's the top of the heap of computer pubs, hanging in there for around 25 years. As my mom reminded me when I told her about the job, 15 years ago when I was trying to get my first job, I made her send me all her back issues of PC Mag to read (at the time, as a Mac user, all I had laying around was Mac User.)

I'll be the senior writer, which means I get to write. A lot. Probably a feature every issue. The job has been described to me as being the "on-staff freelancer." I'll be working directly with the art department on stories, so it'll be a bit more involved than a typical freelancer. I'll also be going into New York City every month or so for meetings -- my first week on the job, starting July 16, will be in NYC. It'll be the most work travel I've done in two years. Before I even start, I have two trade shows coming my way in the next six months.

So what's different? Don't I already sit in a basement and write a lot? Well, yes I do. But now I won't necessarily have daily news stories to file (who knows if that'll change) and I won't be writing about just one little section of the tech industry, namely Wi-Fi. I'll get to write about web sites one issue, security problems on home computers another issue, how well hardware companies behave with customers the next. That's just the ideas I know that are on the editorial calendar. (Hell, it'll be different just to work some place with an editorial calendar again.)

I've always had a policy about not blogging about work, and that will probably continue. Unless I'm writing about something really cool and can't help myself. Wi-Fi stopped being new and exciting to me a while back, thus I never had the enthusiasm to blog about my work even if I didn't have my personal policy. But I'm already excited by the possibilities at Mag.

Yes, I'm going to work in print again, even as print publications, especially those in tech journalism, seem to die off as fast as the generation that begat the baby boomers. But it's PC Mag! Even if it's a gamble it's not that big of one. I'm not going to work for a newspaper -- that would just be crazy!

I've got about two weeks of work left on the wiffie (as we in the biz call it) to wind down, with some vacation time in there, and hopefully a lot of writing and, just maybe, I might clean up my basement office. There might be some video conferencing going on down there with my new co-workers soon.

I'm working on a new novel (a comedy horror fantasy for grown-ups -- it's filled with swears and bad words, just like real-life!) and was doing some research today using, of course, Wikipedia. I really don't know how I got by before with out it. Yeah, yeah, it's all horribly suspect and not to be trusted, but damn if it did not give me the exact thing I wanted: the longitude and latitude of a major city somewhere here on earth.

What's more, I was then able to utilize Google Earth to find not just the long and lat of the city, but I used it to find the super-exact co-ordinates of a specific building in that city. (In a zoo, which I matched to a PDF map the zoo provides at its own Web site.) Thes hyper-accurate co-ordinates will be very, very important in my book (assuming I even remotely follow the outline) and has the added bonus of being scientifically accurate when, inevitably, some one more anal than I checks up on me. (Listen to me, sounding like I've already sold this un-written masterpiece...)

This is all research on a city I've never had a chance to visit. If Google Maps adds its Street View of the city to in the next six months, I probably never have to vist -- I can walk its streets online!

My wife, of course, frowns on this. She wants to travel. But this is so much cheaper.

More construction work? Why not. Two weeks after we framed it out, my brother and I finished up the roof on my parents' back-deck pavilion (it's only a pergola without a roof, I found out) yesterday. It's very nice, and very likely to be the entirety of my inheritance someday. That table in the middle has firepit in the middle, under that center cover tile. So my folks can get some use out of it right up until December, hopefully.

Imagine having your life destroyed because you accidentally handed the wrong comic book to a kid.

It is happening right now, to someone else. But you can help...

A date has been set for the Gordon Lee Trial and the CBLDF Needs You!

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund urgently needs your help. This August, the long-running case of Georgia v. Gordon Lee will finally go to trial, with court costs expected to hit $20,000. For nearly three years the Fund has defended Georgia retailer Gordon Lee, seeing him through multiple arraignments and procedures, and racking up $80,000 in legal bills. The charges stem from a Halloween 2004 incident in which Lee handed out, among other free comics, an anthology featuring an excerpt from the critically acclaimed graphic novel The Salon. The segment depicted a historically accurate meeting between 20th Century art icons Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, the latter depicted in the nude. It was a harmless sequence, no more explicit than the nudity displayed in the award winning Watchmen. Yet because the title found its way into the hands of a minor, Floyd County prosecutors hit Lee with two felony counts and five misdemeanors. The Fund eventually knocked out most of the charges, but must now defeat the two remaining misdemeanor counts of Distribution of Harmful to Minors Material, each carrying a penalty of up to one year in prison and up to $1,000 in fines.

Make a donation and feel good about yourself helping your fellow man and the First Amendment all at once. You can do it via PayPal, through the Fund's online store, or even mail a check. It's just the right god-damn thing to do.

I feel bad that my nephews may grow up in a world devoid of an exchange like this:

"Batten down the hatches!"

"But I did, I did batten 'em down."

"Well batten 'em down again. We'll teach those hatches!"

(Someone tell me what 'toon that's from. The Intertubing has failed me...I think it was Bugs and a kangaroo sailing in a barrel...)

Sometime in the early 1980's, my friend Mark -- who's father had an entire room of his house devoted to science fiction books (and entire GOD DAMN ROOM, people! It remains to this day one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, and all I did was borrow his Star Trek books...) -- introduced me to Doctor Who. Well, re-introduced because I'd watched it a bit when I saw it on PBS in the '70s and of course, like most Americans, didn't think it measured up to Star Trek or Star Wars. But he showed me the error of my ways by making me watch Genesis of the Daleks and I was hooked.

Over 25 years later, I'm hooked more than ever on the return of the Doctor. I thought it couldn't get better than the end of the second series (they don't call them Seasons in the U.K.) last year. But god damn, this Saturday's episode... well, I'll leave it to movie and comic book writer John Rogers on his Kung Fu Monkey blog to spell it out without giving anything away:

...mission goddam accomplished. I was twelve again. Somehow that ending managed to stack multiple geekgasms on top of itself. From the start of a very weak season, we've come to the last few episodes being unending hammer blows of sci-fi coolness.

Amen.

Even this year's Non-Doctor episode, in which the title character is barely seen, was a stunner.

Thanks, Mark. I hope I addicted you to something half as interesting.

I spent the day yesterday doing something I shouldn't: building. That's my brother up on the ladder crafting what will someday be the finished pergola on the back deck at my parents house. (My parents are slowly covering their entire back yard with decking so that by 2025, no one will ever have to mow back there). He does the hard stuff, I just put in screws, and make fun of him when he miscalculates, such as when we though we had 14 boards for the roof stringers, and only had 12. Ooopsie. All told I sunburned my neck, twisted my ankle, scraped my arm, got sawdust in my eyes, ruined one of my favorite shirts, yet still managed to muddle through.

More super-heroic goodness....

This is the opening credits of the 1970's Spider-Man TV show, which I loved as a kid -- I had no ability to distinquish quality from cheese -- and would watch it over and over on VHS, pausing it to see the wires. I especially loved this opening credits music, which is still better than anything Danny Elfman did for the movies.

Peter Parker saving that train full of people in Spider-Man 2 is good, but this is obviously the most heroic act by a movie super-hero ever.

I quite literally never, ever get into my Toyota Prius and look at the cool-ass LCD screen in the dash come to life without thinking of the following exchange:

Atomic batteries to power...
Turbines to speed...
Roger, ready to move out.

I've tried getting my wife to say the first couple lines, but it never takes.