Category: Uncategorized

The Octodog Converter

I was thinking of putting this in the Pit of Geek, but … it’s more creepy than geeky. I do NOT want to eat things that look like that.

So, I registered as a professional and made my hotel reservations for the Comicon back in March. And I haven’t worried too much about it since then, except to be sure my professional registration was accepted and that I’d be able to afford the hotel room. Except that there’s this one other really important thing… See, I have to be able to get to San Diego. Me and my brother both.

Now, my brother theoretically ‘has’ a car, but since he is not licensed nor insured, my father uses it full time, and needs full time access to it to deliver newspapers from every night. It’s how he pays the bills. And he basically pays ALL the bills. So unless he’d repaired the third car in the family by now, the chances of Heath and I just driving off on our own were small.

My sister, Angela, has expressed interest in going with us. She has been in and out of work recently, and said that if she had a job & could get off or if she had no job, but could afford incidentals, she would drive us to San Diego and hang out on the beach or whatever during the days (she hasn’t much interest in the actual convention…). But sometimes she feels like going and sometimes she doesn’t, so I’ve not been counting on her, saying only that “if she’s in a good mood that day, Angela might drive us”.

I have another friend who has expressed interest in driving us to San Diego, and who has the time off work, but they’re not sure they can get a place to stay in San Diego, and may have other responsibilities, plus I’ve not had much luck getting hold of them for a few days. Of course, I’ve been pretty busy/involved myself, but … Whatever. There’s still two weeks until the con.

So then today Angela applied for a job she thinks she’ll get, but if she does, she’ll be in training during the week of the con, and could not attend. So tonight my brother and I went over to priceline to see if we could maybe, theoretically, afford plane tickets. Since Angela and I just drove to Vegas and back, and San Diego isn’t too much further than Vegas (plus we’ll likely do a lot less driving in and around SD than Vegas), we have an idea about how much gas it would take to get there and back.. probably $30-$40. But I know I’m already cutting it pretty close with my cashflow, and Heath has almost no cashflow, so I’m looking at some pretty cheap plane tickets to fit out budget. So I sidle over to priceline.com and punch in my travel dates and my home and destination and that I need two tickets, and I say hey, how about $30 a ticket? That’s ridiculously low, whaddya say?

Well, before it got to the verifying my order part, it informed me that on plane tickets from here to there, there are just over $28 in taxes per ticket. Which doubles the cost of the tickets. So, I dropped my offer down to $15/ticket, and the full price for two $15 tickets is $98.30. Which seems sortof odd to me. I cut what I wanted to pay ($30/ticket) in half, and the total comes out to more, instead ($49.15/ticket). Of course, no airline is going to sell me roundtrip airfare for $15 apiece. So it was refused. I played around with their options, extra transfers, red-eye flights, non-jet planes, up to $16/ticket ($100.30 total, the maximum I could theoretically afford and more than twice the cost of gas), and they just wouldn’t take my offer. Oh well. What was the point? $30 in taxes/fees per ticket seems excessive. It means I can afford $30 less travel. It doesn’t encourge me to travel by air, it discourages me. Charging a $10 9/11 tax doesn’t help the airlines recover from 9/11, trust me. I know, I know, my price is way, way too low. But I’m paying about 40% less than ‘normal’ for my hotel room and I paid about 50% less than normal for the suite I got through Paypal in Vegas, so… I’m just value shopping. Plus, there’s that money problem.

Oh well. Everything will work itself out fine. I’m sure it will. I just need to not worry about it, and everything will be fine. Things will just come together. (Anyone want to help?)

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

-Thomas Mann, novelist, Nobel laureate (1875-1955)

What’s up, people? Am I going to have to reduce the Most Recent posts list on the Modern Evil homepage to 20 now, or are posts going to pick up again? There are so many people out there with access to post who simply aren’t using it… It’s sortof sad, really.

I know, I know, I haven’t been posting much myself lately. I blame … umm… President Bush. He kept calling me up and asking for my advice. And then doing precisely the opposite. Of course then the people who really wanted control over the President arranged to have my phone made useless so he couldn’t call me anymore. I guess we’ll just have to see what he does without my advice. Maybe he’ll call you next.

Hey! How about that war? I heard that as soon as it was over, people would start spending money again! Except … less people are coming up to Pine, less of those are coming into the store, and still fewer of those are spending any money. And when they do spend money it is in smaller amounts. Less and fewer and smaller, not just than last year, but than winter (considered a time of year not really worth bothering to open to many locals) this year, and than during the war. Sure, closing the forest might have something to do with it, but considering it was 113 degrees in Phoenix today, there should at least have been more traffic in town today than we saw. Yeah, well, I heard Bush was working up to a new war, with Iran this time. Which is specifically what I’ve been advising him not to do, right up until he stopped calling me. Because maybe if there’s a war on, people will come spend their money. Maybe if we go to war with North Korea (I’ve been telling him not to battle them since he first called) there can be a thermonuclear exchange and people will really start to open up their pocketbooks, maybe even buy some ‘fine art’. Just like the 34th Rule of Acquisition says, “War is good for business.”

Did I mention I finally got properly spurred to actually begin the work of re-writing my novel? Yeah. Nothing to do with Bush. See, like I said a couple of weeks ago, I was invited into Cafepress’ Print-On-Demand Book Beta. That is, I submitted to them an electronic copy of Forlon, plus a front and back cover, and they sent me a free copy in exchange for my feedback about the product. Fantastic. Partially because it means they’ll have the finished service available soon and I can start using it in a variety of ways. Plus, when I finally got my ‘professionally printed’ copy of Forlorn in my hot little hands, it became a real thing for me that I hadn’t got it re-written yet. Did I mention that Cafepress if ‘featuring’ me at their booth at the Comicon this year? They’re thinking about having several copies of my novel available for purchase at the con. Which scares the bejezzus out of me. (Not that bad, really. Have you ever had a bejezzus take up lodging in your abdomen? They’re pretty annoying.) This isn’t a finished novel, ready for mass consumption. I put it online to try to get myself to edit it sooner, not because I thought it was wonderful. Except then everyone who read it told me they thought it was wonderful, and everyone who didn’t read it said they didn’t like it because nothing bad ever happened to anyone in it. The worst of it was in the first chapter, and even that began after the bad things had happened. Which was fine when I was trying to get a novel written in a week, but … even I knew right away that it wasn’t a very satisfying read. I’ve been working on ideas for the re-write since the moment I stopped writing, November 30th, but I didn’t get started on the rewrite until several weeks ago, when I finally figured out what I wanted to do, made up index cards for blocking out the major story arcs and how they fit together, and managed to get eleven pages re-written to fit the new structure. And then I stopped again. Things just kept getting in the way. Until I had Forlorn in my hands and realised that if I don’t have it totally re-written in time for them to produce it for the con, this feeble first draft may end up in unwitting consumers’ hands. So a couple of days ago I got all my resources together and started re-writing. I’m just over ten thousand words into a novel that should prove to be between 120,000 and 165,000 words long based on the story I’ve developed. Yes, it will not be less than twice as long as Forlorn. Here’s a problem though: unless something strange happens around here in the next week or two I simply will not have enough hours to type it in before the con. Either way, I’m working on it.

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this afternoon. I checked it out from the library and took it in slowly, only reading a couple hundred pages a day. Actually, a big reason for this is because of the time I’ve been putting into my novel. I’ve been reading Harry Potter while I wait for people to show up in the store. I can’t really work on my novel in that environment, though. So at night, when it IS possible to work on the novel, I’ve chosen to do that. Anyway, Zoe and I should be having a MEVBC about it soon, probably laden with all sorts of spoilers. If you’ve already read it or are about to be done reading it, let me know right away so we can try to include you in what may be the last MEVBC meeting ever. Briefly: It was a good book, and much like Harry, I don’t believe that that character is dead for good. I also want to say that if I had access to the classes and teachers and materials that Harry and his schoolmates have, there’s no way I would slack, fall behind, or have trouble paying attention. Oh my gosh. I would probably get all O’s, and take double classes like Hermione. What an opportunity! That is all.

Also, just added to the list of things I don’t like anymore, but used to: jonathan rosenberg. He’s welcome to refer himself to the name of this blog.

Okay, I’ve blathered here long enough. I’m going to go back to work on my novel now. I’ll let you know when I get to 25,000 words. Probably Tuesday night. We’ll see. Depends on whether Bush figures out how to email me, I guess.

So, I was looking around at various phone models offered by various companies, reading reviews and comparing battery life and price and features, and I had just about determined that my choices for Verizon-compatible (ie: CDMA-compatible) mobile phones were between phones so ugly they appear to have been carved out of the branch of an ugly tree by the act of already-hideously-ugly people hitting them with their faces, and too-expensive flip-style phones. Before today, it never occurred to me that “lesser of the evils” would be a flip-phone, one of the worst ideas to come from the damned souls of Man.

Even Nokia, who does have two phones they claim work with Verizon, is forcing my hand. The two phones in question? Remnants of when the bulk of Nokia’s American phones were ugly and cheaply built. Luckily, Zoe pointed me to the Nokia 3586i, a gesture in futility.

For while the phone IS a CDMA phone which based on every word of its technical description should be fully compatible with all of Verizon’s service offerings, it is not listed as being compatible with Verizon. Now, the last Verizon rep I spoke to about phone models advised me that any CDMA-compatible phone not hard-wired for another mobile service provider could be used with their service. So, theoretically if I just went ahead and purchased this phone, I could call Verizon up and get it working. Except that Nokia won’t let me buy it through their site and there does not appear to be any way to order it online through any other company. I even tried figuring out what zip codes US Cellular, the service provider they say supports the phone, provides said service in and plugging that into the Nokia site to at least get a price on the thing, but no US Cellular-supported zip code seemed to do the trick.

There are ZERO Nokia 3586i phones on eBay.

If anyone is aware of a purchase-able mobile phone, compatible with CDMA, which does not appear to have been born in a nightmare, please let me know. Thank you.