Cory Doctorow needs my help selling his new book Little Brother about as much as Robin Williams needs more chest hair. But dammit, I'm telling you anyway, go buy this book. I haven't read it yet, cause I wasn't smart enough to steal the advanced reader copy from the book pile at Viable Paradise last year, and I've regretted it ever since. I'm not even going to wait for the Amazon-with-free-shipping-version nor even Cory's traditional free electronic copies this time. I'm going to be the reader he's always talking about -- the one who read one of his other books for free (and listened to some as free audiobooks) -- and then became a paying reader. That's me, at Borders, tonight. Cause it's easy to see from all the advanced notice this one is not to be missed.

This upcoming movie of Land of the Lost will, no doubt, squirt shit all over my memories of how scary this show seemed when I was a kid, but I'm still thrilled that they got the Sleestak exactly right.

Land Of The Lost: First Glimpse Of New, Non-CGI Sleestaks from io9.com:

They look a bit cooler than the original versions, but still have the actors-in-suits thing...

Herman Melville on life:

...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

Yeah, I'm reading Moby Dick. No one is more surprised than me.

Tips are a staple, some might say the life-blood, of computer journalism. Well, probably no one would say that. But readers do so love learning shortcuts and new ways to do things. Tips are quick and easily digestible...they're the fast food of computer mags! Yum!

That's why PC Magazine has 529 of them coming in the next issue, and they're already posted online, so no waiting. I wrote somewhere around 120 of them, but after I put them in I dunno how many survived. I do know I wrote them for the various Google Tools, Word 2007, and Firefox -- the three software/services I spend 90% of my day in.

Read all 529 and you'll definitely find a life changer or two in there somewhere, no matter what you use.

I went to a free talk tonight given by an IC grad of '74, a long-time book publicist (and author, though he was not shy about admitting he can't write and he always works with ghost writers). It was about "how to get published" and for the most part, he had it right from what I know, though he concentrated mostly on non-fiction (that's the stuff found in the boring parts of the book store) and was a little too into recommending self-publishing using print-on-demand services, which I think is ridiculous.

(Has any one ever written about how self-publishing for prose is considered the worst thing you can do, yet somehow self-publishing in comic books can actually garner you all sorts of praise, assuming you don't suck?)

Anyway, I took some cursory notes, but mostly just enjoying some of his stories (his tear jerker about his dad reading Tuesdays with Morrie was pretty good) and let my mind wander. I've been worried you see... I've had nothing to write lately. My books are at a point where I need to wait for some critiques to come in, so I can fix what needs fixing. In the meantime, nothing.

And then, fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, it came to me, for absolutely no reason at all! A NEW IDEA.

Well, except it wasn't fully formed, it was more like a skeleton inside floppy skin, desperately in need of some muscles and ligaments, but that's more than I had three hours ago.

That's where writers get ideas. From not paying attention.

My Wife -- whom I call Squanto -- has been gone since Saturday, out in California at a conference. She's not back until tomorrow night. Here's how I've managed to capitalize on all the free time this has afforded me:

1. Played approximately 13 hours of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 on the Xbox. Most of it with my brother and Joe. Including a 4 hour session on Saturday night.
2. Put away approximately three years worth of comics, including the last few "floppies" I purchased before going all trade paperback graphic novel only. Bought three short boxes for the comics (I need to move from all long boxes to short. The longs are too heavy.)
3. Wrote three critiques for my online writing critique group. At least one may have been coherent.
4. Watched 3 Netflix Movies in one day: Hot Rod (could have been funnier), Enchanted (surprisingly great), and Justice League: The New Frontier (not as good as the comic it is based on, though it did make me crave a Green Lantern movie starring David Boreanaz, and I'm not even a big GL fan).
5. Ingested:
   1. An entire rotisserie chicken
   2. Two bowls of salad (with copious croutons)
   3. One bag of kettle-cooked potato chips
   4. A cake
   5. Three baby carrots
6. Helped my dogs deposit a couple of pounds of dog hair on the carpet. (They didn't really need help, but they're needy and want extra petting when mommy isn't home.)
7. Got a haircut.
8. Mailed new copy of my revised/edited/chopped/cut manuscript for my first novel to my agent.
9. Finished another feature for work, started another, planned yet another, and wrote one blog entry.

Wow, I'd planned this entry to show my sloth-like existence (number of walks in the park: zero!), but I almost feel like I accomplished something. Especially by eating that cake. It was like a mound of fudge the size of softball, people! It was hard work!

Don't watch this if you ever intend to see There Will Be Blood. (And if you don't intend to see it, sucks for you.)

Best. Line. Ever.

Some might call this cruel, some might call it funny, but I call it good training, especially having had my Labradors knock over an entire sliding screen door in their excitement to go out...

Want to listen to my uniquely-squeaky-yet-middle-aged voice talk about tech? Check out the link below, and skip to the bottom to get the MP3 of my interview the Smart Family on Online Tonight. (As always, I try to speak without ums or uhs, and not to fast, and sometimes, on topic. Occassionally, I manage all three.)

Smart Family Tour: PCMag, Nim and Your Calls

My dad has finally mastered sending email with a method he's comfortable with... he just sends pictures from his digital camera through KodakGallery.com. (and to be fair, he's not alone in sending this way.)

This image is his latest... it depicts the donkey hood ornament (with light up eyes) he got for Xmas, finally mounted on his truck. Tis a thing of beauty, even if the ass looks like its taking a dump on the hood. And, it makes him look like he'd actually vote for Hillary!

Not only did I finish my novel in March, I had a good time at work, too.

Turns out four out of the top seven stories at PCMag.com for March were written by yours truly. Of course, stories two, three, and four together don't hold a candle to the traffic of the top story (Best Free Software), thanks to that Yahoo link. But it all adds up to a happy me.

When I was in high school, I actually had two jobs. One of them was fun (most of the time), but paid like crap (minimum wage was around $3.75 back in 1987. That was being a Sunday morning DJ, which meant getting up at five (sucked), playing Catholic radio shows for seven hours (sucked), and hanging out with my friends in the radio station any time I wanted cause we all worked there and had keys (awesome).

My other job was not as much fun, but it paid great, as much as $16 bucks an hour! I taught cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to hospital staff, mostly nurses, who needed to be re-certified. It meant a lot of time cleaning out the innards of Resesci Annies (the creepy training dummies), which filled with condensed spit after 15 to 20 people had given her mouth-to-mouth to fill her plastic bag lungs. Worse was grading tests and telling nurses 30 years my senior they failed.

I have never had to give CPR to a living person. I've only been in a position to do so once, when on the family vacation as a teen. A guy collapsed coming down some stairs at the motel we stayed at on the way to Florida, somewhere in Virginia, I believe. My dad, still an active EMT at the time, saw it and took off. My brother and I followed (leaving the motel room door open; my mom came out of the bathroom moments later to find the door open, annoyed cause she probably had not yet buttoned up all the way). But she found us and gave Dad a hand (she's an RN and the one who got me the job doing CPR instruction in the first place, natch). I never had to do a thing, and was nervous the entire time that I would be asked to step in. (The guy, by the way, was dead before he hit the ground.)

Later that night, we all went to dinner at a Roy Rogers fast food joint, and ended up kicking my dad out of the booth to go over to a drug store across the street to get some mouth wash. Even after eating fried chicken his breath smelled like that of the dead guy. Considering his breath usually smelled of unfiltered Camels, that's not saying much for the late victim.

I bring all this up because I read the other day that the American Heart Association has now proclaimed "You can skip the mouth-to-mouth breathing and just press on the chest to save a life" (in the words of CNN). I think this is hail-Mary pass by the AHA to get people to do something, anything, to help a collapsed person after so many years of mouth-to-mouth jokes in film and on TV, stigmas against same-sex kissing, and the all-to-real fear of halitosis from the dead that once afflicted my pa. I guess it's better than nothing tho. (However, it's only applicable to adults with sudden cardiac arrest. If it's a kid, they're more likely to have breathing problems.) There's even a Web site: Hands-only CPR. Looking into this more, I found in 2005 they made CPR guidelines as simple as could be already to get people into doing it. I wonder if the nurses at St. James even need certification anymore, or if any ol' method works, even if it breaks every rib you've got...

Me, I'll stick with the way I learned 22 odd years ago and still do the breathing. If I have to. Which I hope I won't. And if I do, I'm off for a bottle of Scope, ASAP.

This starts out great... and then gets BETTER.

So my wife spent part of last weekend in Kentucky. Why on earth does someone go to Kentucky if they don't have a horse in the derby? I am about to find out.

Our story was, she was there for a dog agility seminar. Actually, what she was doing was being wined and dined by the higher-ups at the University of Kentucky for a job as the marketing director for the entire school. The weather was great, the people were nice, the alcohol was flowing... so apparently my wife bought it. What's more, this follows a few weeks of back and forth on the phone -- so they made her an offer.

For the last two days we've debated. It's a crazy time to put a house on the market, but we're pretty sure we can under-cut the prices of both houses on either side of us that are for sale, and still come out way ahead of what we paid...

So, yeah. It would appear I will soon be a Kentuckian. Kentuckite? Kentucker? I have much to learn. And a lot to pack.

So next year, I'm just going to call up my family and bold face lie to them for April Fool's Day, since they apparently didn't read this and get the nice panic I wanted. Of course, last year, it took 2 weeks for some to fall for the whole "we're pregnant" post. But that made me feel guilty. I'm just too nice for April Fool's.