Mooching and Boobies

• 23:33 My weekend of mooching comes to a close. I drove 500 miles to not pay for any meals at all! Plus my dogs got hotdogs. #
• 09:27 RT @guigar Disney to acquire Marvel comics for $4 billion: bit.ly/cNYrA [Spider-Mouse!] #
• 22:50 RT @jay_lake: #wip Every man has a weakness, and most of those weaknesses have breasts. #

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I Went to Jersey and All I Got Was a Free Meal and Great Company

• 23:33 why am I in Jersey? #fb tmic.fm/ouc9okf5w4r #

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Just What the World Needs: Audio Tweets

• 00:03 1st audio tweet. maybe the last? tmic.fm/oubx0dibshq #
• 06:40 scratchy throat. tmic.fm/ouc7is60o3h #
• 09:24 The ability to toggle smart quotes on/off in Word with a single button push may be the greatest achievement I make in computing all year. #

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Working from Home Today!

• 08:53 Right. Quite Right. You're bloody well right. You got the bloody right to say. #
• 09:10 Remember when Segway scooters were gonna be more important than PCs or the Internet? Those were the days, my friends. #
• 09:16 RT @AppScout: Facebook 3.0 Finally Available for iPhone bit.ly/3mBmvp [about frickin' time.] #
• 09:37 Ah, Fridays, and the never ending emails from co-workers saying they're working from home today. I resist the urge to write one. This time. #
• 11:04 I'm with @PNH. Time to re-trivialize tweeting. Everyone tell me what you're having for lunch. #
• 16:35 Time for my pilgrimage to Barnes and Noble for free a/c and writing time. I will not look at books. #

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The Search for A Gigabit Switch

• 06:37 RT @PCMag Labs Review: Western Digital WD ShareSpace. 4.5 Stars and Editors' Choice. bit.ly/18z9y6 #
• 10:19 power supply died on my Gigabit switch. Cable strewn about now like tentacles. #
• 11:38 Search Amazon for Gigabit Switch from Linksys, Netgear, Belkin and 1st pass brings up OLD products...yet latest models are available. wtf. #
• 13:30 I hate when the work Web-mail is down. Then I have to turn my body a quarter-turn to the left to use my work laptop! This ain't ergonomic! #
• 16:09 Next door's trombone practice selection of the day sounds like the five-notes from Close Encounters played in various keys. Over. And. Over. #
• 16:09 RT @TechSaver: Amazon: Save $47 on the D-Link 8-Port Gigabit Desktop Switch bit.ly/2mlS4 [Profit from my misfortune!] #
• 21:57 God do I hate being 629 messages behind in reading my RSS feeds. #

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Also, I'd Rather be Dusting

• 13:47 Sign of a great work day: I'd rather be vacuuming. #fb #
• 23:19 How sad to realize I need coasters. #

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Wiffie Prostitutes

• 09:37 RT @JasonCross00: I just can't wait for Follow Friday. You must follow this now: @shitmydadsays [No Lie. Perhaps best use of Twitter ever] #
• 11:14 I can't tell if that noise from the next building is a guy making karate moves ("Hi-ya!") or an asthmatic dog barking at regular intervals. #
• 11:43 Tech term I haven't heard in years comes back to me today in a vendor meeting: OLE (object linking and embedding). Can't say I missed it. #
• 12:59 "Sin Locker" - It's a locker... filled with SIN. #RandomStoryTitlesInMyHead #
• 13:53 WiFi Prostitutes: "You ain't got no dubya-ee-pee, you best be movin' on!& quot; is.gd/2yekJ [Try not to be upset by no hyphen in Wi-Fi] #
• 14:56 Tried a new Twitter app today (bdule, thanks2 @jasoncross00 !) but went back to Twhirl. Why? I missed its noises. I'm Pavlov's tweeter. #

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Needed and Found: Smart Quotes Toggle

• 09:52 MS Word needs -- okay, I NEED -- a toggle button to turn Smart Quotes on and off. If there's a way to do it via Macro, I'm too dumb. #
• 10:02 My parents are on the way to Ohio to pick up a lawnmower they bought on eBay. I suspect it may be a goat w/ John Deere logo shaved into fur. #
• 11:43 Oh, Google, you never fail me. I found macro code for toggling Smart Quotes on the fly in Word 2007. is.gd/2wwvD #
• 12:54 I'm dealing with multiple PR people with same first name today. Confusing. Melissas of Earth, try going into another field. #
• 17:22 A perfect 1:1 ratio, distilled from 17 years of use -- my love for Microsoft Word and my hatred for Microsoft Outlook. #

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Half a Trombone

• 13:26 Half a bee, philosophically, must ipso-facto half not be. #
• 15:16 iTunes, fan, Roomba, and dishwasher together can not completely drown out kid practicing trombone in the next building. #

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Adult Acquisitions

• 08:57 RT @ColleenLindsay: Announcing the BEST SWIVET CONTEST EVER! Win a scholarship to the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar!!! bit.ly/atTd6 #
• 09:35 In the world of publishing, a job with the title "adult acquisitions" is not what you might think. Or hope. #
• 13:50 Thanks AT&T for continued s#!t-a$$ service in my apartment. Why would I have wanted that text invite to go see a Tarantino movie anyway? #fb #
• 13:51 Accidental hash tag. Don't use pound sign when faux-swearing in tweets. Lesson learned. #
• 14:56 Hate AT&T. Love iPhone. Love VZW. Hate it's phone. This sums up all t he problems in America today. That, and "death panels." #
• 14:57 Hate VZW's phoneS. Don't want to imply it only has one crappy phone, when it has a slew of them. (yeah, yeah... i mean in COMPARISON.) #
• 16:21 How did I get on a list to get a catalog for "school events"? It's filled with homecoming tiaras and crowns! #

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You Will Believe a Man Can Write

• 09:53 My friend @danamrich is going to be EIC of official World of Warcraft: The Magazine! Awesome. (I really should play that someday) #fb #wow #
• 11:32 Was convinced I had a vendor meeting on the phone at 11:30...a meeting that is actually for next Tuesday. Why don't I feel more free? #
• 11:37 Avatar looks like Halo. www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avatar/teaserlarge.html For a while. #
• 19:29 whenever I'm writing, whatever I'm writing, if Pandora plays John William's theme from Superman... I believe a man can write a book. #

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Unicorn Puke

• 08:19 Waiting for Prius during 50k mile service. 3.5 yrs of use. Hope to eek out another 100k thru 2017 since she only uses engine half the time… #
• 08:20 Old hippie dude just came in with ugliest tie-dye shirt I've ever seen. Looks like a unicorn eating Skittles puked on him. #
• 13:18 RT @AppScout: MySpace Halts Instant Music Streaming bit.ly/3vNy5g [This would be great news...if anyone gave a crap bout Myspace] #
• 14:49 RT @TechSaver: TechSaver has officially launched its own website today. Visit us at www.techsaver.com #
• 16:38 Craig's List knows.. . tentative opening day for FIVE GUYS in Ithaca -- Sept. 20! #
• 21:22 I've tentatively handed over reins of the @cbldf site, a couple years after I "quit." Tho I'll never quit them that makes funny books free. #
• 21:23 In other words, keep your eyes on www.cbldf.org in the coming months. I expect it will become truly awesome. #
• 21:37 Speaking of the graphical literature, I just bought some for the first time since January. #HobbyFail twitpic.com/ejfth #
• 22:02 Wet dogs shaking off inside a cramped Prius...car is starting to smell like the inside of a tauntaun. #

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The Right Way to Open a Banana

• 10:01 Plastic Man. Plastic Man! The one, the original, elastic man. Always in great shape, for the shape he's in. The fantastic... Plastic Man! #
• 10:10 RT @PCMag: "Apple and Me: An Imperfect Union" bit.ly/iQIYK @wwwendyyy defends Apple, even through rough times. #
• 11:46 RT @bheater: @dailycrosshatch FINALLY has a Twitter page! #
• 12:00 RT @realjohngreen: Holy crap. THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING! The right way to open a banana: bit.ly/nBc7b (via @zefrank) #
• 15:09 I've had some of the same movies in my Netflix queue since 2001. I still pretend I'll som eday get to them. #BlackHawkDownFail #
• 16:27 My favorit PCMag After Hours Puppet Promo 3 bit.ly/47efQ6 because I'm sure they broke the camera. #

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Return of the Tweets!

• 11:54 RT @themediaisdying: Reader's Digest filing for Chap 11 protection : bit.ly/nBtpj (via @foliomag / @auddevmag) #

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Return from WorldCon

Anticipation, AKA WorldCon09, is over. I'm home, my friends are (mostly) home, the pro writers are all (mostly) home, and the world is back to what we laughingly call "normal." It was an amazingly fun five days, with so many ups, so few downs.

Here's what I will NOT miss:

1. The water in Montreal. It tastes like rusted ass.
   
2. Overweight shut-ins who can only get about on Rascal Scooters, out for their annual pilgrimage to be with "their kind" (fellow geeks). It ain't a wheel chair, slug people, so I don't feel very damn bad being in your way, to be honest. (Yes, I know: they probably have a glandular problem. And a very nice personality. I don't care when they try to play bumper cars with my shins.)
   
3. City prices for booze and food. Not that I'm not used to it, but what I am used to is expensing it to my company when I travel for them. This trip was all on me.
   
4. The 28th floor of the Delta hotel. It was the party floor, and I did go to one great party there -- the launch party for my friend Kim's book, "The Song and the Sorceress." How that party seemed to actually allow breathing when all the others just started to smell like feet is beyond me.
   
5. The almost complete lack of free Wi-Fi. The convention center wanted to charge $350 for five days of Wi-Fi use per device! Uh, welcome to 2009. Next time I go out of the country, I'll spring for the 20 Megabytes of data uses on my iPhone. Though I still got better Wi-Fi in Montreal than I do phone service in my own apartment.

What I will miss and will remember for a long time:

1. The Viable Paradise XI* "nook" in the Delta hotel bar. While there I:
1. Bought drinks for Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear (even tho I made my friend Julia pay! FTW.)
2. Did not meet John Scalzi, but I took his picture.
3. Talked my friend Heather --okay, browbeat her -- into approaching Neil Gaiman to say hi
4. Got the group of my friends to brainstorm new titles for my book. (Fav: "Driving Miss Ghostie.")
5. Was regaled by extremely beautiful woman for a long time about how I should drop everything and travel around the world with just the clothes on my back. She has me half convinced.
2. Getting to meet my friends' publisher and pitch him my book. He seemed very receptive... he'll be getting that in e-mail later tonight.
3. Getting the first chapters of my current work in progress novel critiqued by a couple of pros, including the amazing Nancy Kress, who's column I writing I used to read voraciously in Writer's Digest magazine (before I stopped reading it because reading about writing, it turns out, is not actually writing... that took me years to realize. I'm a genius.) She and the group (including author J. A. Pitts) helped me come up with some ideas for improving the first chapters and interesting directions for my protagonist. And I learned that what I thought were interesting throw-away lines were, to others, serious foreshadowing of cool stuff I had not planned. Hmm. The day after that critique, Nancy Kress won her second Hugo award. (So did Scalzi and Bear and Neil.)
4. My first kaffeeklatsch. I had no idea what to expect, really, but sitting down with Jay Lake for an hour in a round table discussion just to get to know the guy (who's work I admit I have not followed, despite knowing he's a fave and friend of several of my VPeeps), was fascinating. Both to find out how he mixes the amazing and mundane of his life (day job and cancer and writing 2,500 words a minute to make "vomit copy" drafts of multiple books a year). Endlessly fascinating to me.


5. Did I mention Kim's book launch party? That was a good, good time. After I left, even Larry Niven came in.
6. Hanging out with my brand-newest friend Katrina, a VPeep from the year after mine, and a Montreal native, now living in Vancouver. On a boat. Working at a game company. And she used to work for Pixar. And she speaks French, which is hot. She's pretty much hand-crafted out of awesome by some pantheon of Canadian Gods I'm unfamiliar with. I hope her cold gets better soon and I wish I'd caught it so I could take today off.
7. Meeting Mur Lafferty. I bought her book "Playing for Keeps" from her, which I've already read/heard on her podcast, and still forgot to have her sign it. Duh. (Also got her direct email, so I can bug her about some podcast ideas I have; hope I get around to them soon, as I started talking about them 11 months ago.)
8. Did I mention the beautiful woman in the Delta bar?
   
9. Most of all, hanging with my fellow Elevenses: Kim, Julia, Heather, with occasional visits by the one-and-only Chris K., all the way up from Brazil.

The fun I had convinced me there's no reason at all not to do it again in a few months, so I'm going to World Fantasy in San Jose around Halloween. Take on a little "writers' retreat" time on that plus even more VPXIers being there, and it might be even better than WorldCon09, but I find that hard to believe. At the moment.

*Viable Paradise is a weeklong workshop for scifi/fantasy writers held every year on Martha's Vineyard. I went in 2007. You can read my report on it . Or not.