Quick Update

No much going on recently, hence the lack of any posts. More keys are not working on my main laptop, which means it is getting unusable as the keys that have no gone are letters. I'm now uninstalling as much software from the computer as I can while I can. Loosing letters makes it far more difficult to use the computer. However, if I can use a USB mouse there's no reason I can't use a USB keyboard, and hence extend the life of the laptop. It' something to look into.

I've bought a lot of books recently, including tomes from Rhys Hughes and Neal Asher(direct and signed by the author!) so I have a lot to read through. There have also been books bought in shops as I used up most of my points on my Waterstone's card. Since they dropped the 3 for 2 it's hardly worth browsing let alone buying. It's a sad day when newsagents give better deals than dedicated bookshops.

Doing Nothing

Not had much worth blogging about lately. Everything has been calm and quiet.

I ordered The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer Volume 2 Of Dust and Soul a while ago and it arrived a few weeks back. Not only that but I got a nice little bookmark thanking me for being one of the first one hundred to order the book. I've read through some of it and enjoyed what I've read so far but I'm saving the novella for later on. It's a numbered limited edition and I got the same number as volume one.

 

Also a limited edition is Spicy Adventures by Robert E Howard, which arrived last week, and again I received the same number as previous books bought. The stories were published in the pulps and in a paperback in the 1980s. I have the 1980s paperback and it's in quite good nick: apparently it's a bit of a rare item. Again this is a well made book, solid and bright with clean bright white pages. Taken from the original manuscripts the stories are supposed to be substantially different from the previously published versions, and I'm looking forward to reading these and the extras included in the book. I might even dig out the old paperback and see what the differences were from the previously published versions to the original manuscripts.

I noticed that the Waterstone’s shop I frequent most has totally redesigned their layout. The Science Fiction section has been moved and revamped, beefed up a bit.

I've recently picked up a couple of Neal Asher novels. I got his newest hardback, The Departure, and in the main quite liked it. At present I'm reading Orbus, which I picked up at Waterstone's in hardback for £5.99. It was in a section for reduced and remaindered books. Remaindered books used to be a few boxes on a table the back of the shop. I also got a collection of three stories by Elmore Leonard. I’ve read a couple and they’re quite good.

I visited Hanselled Books some months ago and decided to take a trip in again. I went a bit mad and got a fair few books, including quite a bit of non-fiction. I picked up books from a few new to me authors that piqued my interest and a couple from favourite authors. The non-fiction mainly centred on Scottish myths and tales and a couple of books about the Medieval period. The fiction was either SF or crime fiction.

Interzone No 67 January 1993, ISSN 0264-3596

It’s been a long time, as the song says.

There hasn’t been much activity on the Bob Shaw front. I’ve only got one of his books to get in hardback, Palace of Eternity, before my Gollancz collection is complete. I did try to buy it on eBay but my best offers kept getting knocked back.

Once the hardbacks are complete it is then on to getting all his short stories, which means various Science Fiction magazines.

But, bought from eBay, was the special edition of Interzone by and about Bob Shaw: number 67 from January 1993. According to the Editorial is was due to appear a year previously but was delayed due to the death of Bob’s wife: indeed the issue is dedicated to the memory Sadie Shaw.

There’s two Bob Shaw stories in this issue, A Time To Kill and Alien Porn. There’s an interview with Bob Shaw by Helen Wake, Brian Stableford does a review of Shaw’s work and finally there are extracts from Shaw’s non-fiction book How To Write Science Fiction.

The only thing new to me is A Time To Kill, seeing as the other piece of fiction, Alien Porn, is an extract from Warren Peace – which is nicely placed at the middle of the magazine, and therefore has the staples going through it.*

I’m saving A Time To Kill for later on in the week, when I can sit down, read and savour a brand new (to me) Shaw story.

There were a couple of interesting titbits throughout the magazine though. Apparently The Ceres Solution was heavily edited for the UK edition – I’ll have to buy a US version to re read it – and there was hint that a revised edition (‘new, improved version’) of this novel could be released in the UK. That never happened but there’s nothing stopping Gollancz doing it. Bob Shaw himself provided the cartoons for the How To Write Science Fiction section. Also revealed was that the character from Who Goes Here, Warren Peace, was to have appeared in two more novels after Warren Peace. One wonders how far, if at all, Bob Shaw got with these?

I was also able to compare Interzone past and present. Interzone is still going strong, although it doesn’t appear to number issues any more, and is bloody good value for money nowadays considering the cover price of the 1993 issue was £2.50 (put up that very issue) and the cover price for Interzone now is £3.95. I don’t think that’s much of an increase over nearly twenty years.

 

*You have to read either Warren Peace or the story to understand this reference.

WebMatrix

On the whole I find Microsoft products quite competent and usable. I came across Webmatrix quite recently, billed as a simple web page design tool, where websites can be created and published for free. The home page for the application had the Wordpress logo on it so I thought it was worth downloading and having a look. I already have Artisteer, and – now that a few settings have been changed on my servers – installing plugins and updating Wordpress directly is a breeze.

The first red flag for Webmatrix was that you can’t download and install it directly. It has to download a stub and then there are online downloads and installations that happen within another program. Twelve products in all were downloaded and the ‘minutes’ that it was supposed to take was closer to half an hour.

When it was finished dumping software on my hard drive I launched the app and selected the create Wordpress page option, whereupon it told me that MySql wasn’t installed and would I like to install it? I select yes and am presented with a request for username and password. Tip for Microsoft: don’t create and distribute programs that have this level of failure at the ‘create document’ stage.

It was probably the quickest time software was on my computer before being removed. And, of course, all the twelve applications had to be uninstalled one at a time.

Someone should tell Microsoft that installing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to then install Webmatrix and add ons before installing the latest version of web applications is not simple but is in fact a fairly complicated procedure; particularly in comparison to something like Wordpress which does in fact have a simple five minute install. The database stuff for Wordpress is dealt with before installing Wordpress, not after. Simple fact, if software isn’t usable it wont get used.

Upgrade of Blog

I upgraded Artisteer – or, rather, bought a year of updates. It’s up to version three now and had a few new features that looked cool. So I spent the money and downloaded then activated the latest version. It seems a little slower but at least it was able to upload successfully to blogger. The last time I tried that the whole blog went haywire and I had to chose one of the default templates, which I’ve been using ever since. A few clicks in Artisteer and then uploading it and the new template is fine.

Old and new

I bought a second hand computer with Windows 7 on it – the 64 bit version. I’m not too impressed. I can’t run Virtual PC on it -  well I can but it’s the new version that is integrated into Windows (with no uninstall) which is vastly inferior to the previous standalone version. It wont boot half the Virtual Discs I have and wont install without a fight some of the operating systems I have. I might have to install Sun’s VBox, which worked quite well with most of the old OSs I have.

I also did the usual uninstalling of software not needed to create more space on the hard drive. I came across a shook: Adobe Reader 9 MUI takes up 650 MB of space! For a PDF reader! What are they thinking? Microsoft Works took 750MB; it too was unceremoniously dumped as it’s the new ‘with ads’ version. If I need Works I have plenty of previous versions lying around. The apps taking up a lot of space might be the difference between 32 and 64 bit software but that’s a hell of a lot of space for a limited program such as the Adobe Reader; and considering a word processor, spreadsheet and database suite only took one hundred megabytes more.

The good news is that I was able to register my copy of Microsoft Office 2007 on it. I bought a 3 licence copy a few years ago. I’ve successfully installed and registered four copies, which over about three years is good – even though technically I’m only allowed three installations. There’s probably some leeway within the system; as long as I’m not installing it on hundreds of systems they’ll probably allow a little over the amount.

I bought and read One Who Walks Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis. It’s her reminiscing about the time she spent with Robert E Howard. I’ve been re reading a lot of Howard lately and one of the books I flipped through was the paperback edition (first time in paperback the cover declares) of Dark Valley Destiny by The de Camps and Jane Whittington Griffin. I bought it in the eighties at the Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh and was a little disappointed at it when I first read it. There wasn’t too much available about Howard in the early eighties Scotland and it was like gold dust as far as I was concerned. On first reading it I was perturbed by the constant harping and sniping at Howard’s writing by De Camp: there are constant snipes at the stories Howard wrote, more often than not putting them down. I was puzzled at the time but now I think it was just jealousy on the part of de Camp.

Anyway, apparently Novalyne Price Ellis was angry at the way Howard was portrayed by de Camp and dug out her diaries to set the record straight. The result was the book, also filmed as The Whole Wide World. Another book followed later.

It was a good read but about a third too long for my tastes. I began to loose interest near the end as I felt I was just slogging through it and she was beginning to repeat herself. It did shed a lot of (her) light on Howard and was a good peek into the way they lived their lives in a small Texas town in the thirties.

Rediscoveries

My didn’t May fly by?

After reading the two Howard books that arrived recently I went back to my collection and dug out some other books by Howard to read. I’ve went through a fair bit. I have an old hard back of Skull Face and Others and dipped in and out of that, along with paperbacks of Solomon Kane stories and other collections. (As an aside I recently saw the film Solomon Kane, released last year or the year before: abysmal, Howard would go on a bloody rampage against the film makers for such drivel.) His stories set in the Crusades are brilliant. A recent 3 for 2 at Waterstone’s had a – shock horror – short story collection among them. Collections of short stories are getting rarer and rarer nowadays: not like the old days when, particularly in Science Fiction, they were ten a penny. I remember I had more Robert Silverberg short story collections than novels from him.

Other recent rediscoveries were playing the guitar. I dug my guitar out and put new strings on it, and then dug out the 8 track recorder. I have an effects pedal somewhere but with the 8 track it’s superfluous.  It’s a Boss CR-600 and a few years old but is still full of surprises as to the amount of things it can do. It’ll take me a while to build up the muscles on my left hand and harden my fingertips again – and get back into making half decent music – but it’s fun playing once more.

Small Irritations

Easter weekend and the weather has been so so, which means I can’t get out and cut the grass; the dampness would make it too tricky to cut properly. (That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.)

I have no idea what happened on the laptop but something changed configurations leading to the DVD drive not being recognised, among a few other operating system anomalies.  They were quickly sorted out though - after a few trips to the internet to remind me how to fix them.

I picked up a fair bunch of books at Waterstone’s, including some on special offer plus the usual three for two. The Templars and The Shroud of Christ by Barbara Frale was quite a well written and engaging book but had very little to to with the Templars; indeed it veered off in other directions quite a bit. Even more disappointing is the fact that it wasn’t the full story; the rest is to be in a second book. California by Ray Banks was bought because it was cheap and advertised in a small box as by a local author. It’s a novella – or novelette, could never quite get the distinction between those two – and started off quite well but sort of lost its way and in the end petered out. Entertaining but a disappointing end.

Possession by Peter James must have set a personal record; I decided to stop reading about one and a half pages in. It only cost £2.99 and is over a decade old but failed to set up anything straightaway, or engage my attention, and I stopped at a contradiction on the second page where the writer said it was ‘still dark’ outside whereas he had started the book with a pink dawn. The was a real lack of any explanation in the first page and a bit of where the main character was: if he does that right at the start I’m figuring he’s going to continue doing it.

The good news is that the Pars won the local top of the table derby clash and damn near championship decider on Saturday. They beat Raith Rovers two one and more or less (touch wood) clinched the first division championship and promotion to the silly pillock league. I nearly went to the game but in the end never got round to it. It was a sell out and quite a good game; I listened to it on the radio as Radio Scotland were doing live commentary. So with Kirkcaldy Kuffed it made an enjoyable end to an irritating day.

Computers And Software

The computer seems to be fighting back recently. Or at least being a little recalcitrant. I’ve been into emulation quite a lot. I already have Amiga Forever on my laptop, which emulates the Amiga, and still use it quite a bit. I also have MS Virtual PC on the computer for older operating systems and trying out software I’m unsure of before installing it (or not) on the laptop.

Recently I bought some software from eBay and it turned out to be for the Mac and not PC (no response from the seller yet) so I installed a Mac emulator and used the software. That was very weird as I had a Mac emulator running inside an emulated PC. Emulation within emulation.

It’s been yonks since I used Macs; way back in the eighties when they looked much like the average PC – big monitor, box, keyboard – if not behaved like them.

I have some spare copies of old operating systems (PC ones) lying around so I thought I’d create some virtual machines while I was using Virtual PC. I got a shock when the cd for Windows NT 4 exploded in the drive. It broke into three pieces, spitting out one and dislodging the lip of the DVD drive. Luckily it didn’t harm the drive, which still reads CDs and DVDs, and the broken lip was easily clipped back into place. There must have been a crack in the CD or something, but it wasn’t noticeable before I put it in the drive: damn noticeable afterward.

I purchased Project:Messiah (bought three licenses actually) when they ran their Dare to Share promotion. It was a no brainer. A thousand dollar software program for $40 (about thirty odd quid after currency conversion). Duh.

It has tight integration with Lightwave and there are lots of video tutorials helping new users into the program. It is fantastic and I wish I could use it all day every day but my use is limited to a few hours here and there. It is the full animation package, lacking only a detailed modeller. It does setup, animation and rendering, which are very easy to do within the program, although rendering requires a lot of work to get things right. It started off as a plug-in for Lightwave but has since grown into a full package in its own right which is just as broad and varied as Lightwave.

I’ve been able to do a fair few things with Messiah. Although a lot of these same things can be done in Lightwave it seems easier and more pleasurable in Messiah. Morphs are a problem though. It’s tricky to get the facial expressions just right in Lightwave; it’s a lot easier in another program I have, Quidam, and I have considered purchasing an upgrade to Quidam as it does morphs in a new feature in the newest version but their web store is currently unavailable and I’m not able to upgrade at the moment.

I’m getting a bit fed up with Google Reader. Although it saves a lot of time and a lot of surfing it is annoying in that I can’t get rid of some blogs. A few of the blogs I follow either stopped or changed location – and feeds – so I make changes in Google Reader don’t I? The thing is Reader doesn’t want to accept those changes. The blogs I deleted turn up again. Then I move them to another folder and they turn up in the main list again. I’ve tried to get rid of them a few times now and in the end I just gave up. I ignore them whenever I log into Google.

I’m reading and enjoying the two R E Howard books that arrived recently; lots of good stories. I’m also reading a lot of non-fiction (another three for two at Waterstones’ which are building up points on the Waterstones’ card). I also bought Eye In The Sky by P K Dick. I’ve got buckets of his books but never got this one for some reason. Going through the list of books inside Eye in The Sky it seems there are still a few of his novels I still haven’t got or read. Also just got another Neal Asher book, a second hand copy of Cowl. I’ve just finished The Technician by Neal Asher and that was a great book; looking forward to Cowl. Also arrived fresh from the states – finally – is Up The bright River by Philip Jose Farmer.

Two Bob Howards

And the Howard books duly arrive. They were sent from Texas on 23 February by Tom. So that’s under a week: excellent delivery from the postal service on that one.

And the books themselves are very impressive. Well produced, clean, crisp, and on very bright paper. These are wonderful books and well worth the money. Of course the content is going to be brilliant too – I’ve never read anything duff from Howard.

I’m really not too sure which one I’ll start reading first. They both have works from Howard I’ve not read yet, and they both have additional material which I’m sure will be illuminating.

Not sure if it’s easily seen in the above picture but I got number 139 for both volumes. They are already on second printings. The books can be bought here.

Reading Habits

I used another laptop to browse the Internet while my main laptop was backing up with Norton Ghost – I’ve found through experience that although you can work while important system programs are in progress it’s best not to. Even though my time online recently has gone way down – mostly at weekends, hardly every during the week – the second laptop has picked up some malware. This is probably because it’s hardly used, and I don’t have any anti spy ware or anti virus on it, although I’m pretty sure the built in fire wall is on. (It could be because the laptop hasn’t been upgraded with the latest windows updates for a while.) So I’ll put it to the side until I can find a cure for the particular piece of nasty software that is on it.

I’ve read quite a bit lately -  the books I’m expecting haven’t turned up yet; the Howard books are in the process of being shipped and the Farmer book hasn’t been published yet. I think Subterranean Press are doing a great job but it would be nice if they published books on time. All the books I’ve (pre) ordered from them have been late in being published.

I went on a Yurick binge. Sol Yurick is an American novelist probably most famous for The Warriors. I love the film of that book and years ago had a tatty paperback of that novel which has now disappeared; probably thrown out. He’s a very good writer and recently I thought I’d get a new edition of The Warriors. His books were so cheap on Amazon and Abe Books that I ended up getting practically his whole output – including a hardback edition of one of his books for one pence. Among others I’ve bought there’s been another 3 for 2 from Waterstone’s; two novels from Henning Mankell and a non fiction book. Menkell is famous for Wallander; the Swedish original TV series is quite good but the UK remake is pure drivel. I couldn’t get into the first of his books but ‘Italian Shoes’ is intriguing and interesting.

I’ve also switched back into old habits when it comes to reading. For the last few years I’ve been reading books exclusively; starting and finishing – or abandoning – a book before turning to another. Recently I’ve been going through more than one at a time. It’s pretty weird reading Neal Asher’s The Technician (a really strong book from this author) at the same time as The Histories by Herodotus, An Island Death by Sol Yurick and Menkell but it has been enjoyable. All these books were bought in the last week or so and I’m going through them at a pace. Maybe there’s something in reading more than one book at once.

More Amiga

I haven’t been reading much lately, but I’m looking forward to getting three new books. Philip Jose Farmer, Up The Bright River is due to be published soon. I bought it when it was announced and looking forward to reading it.

I also ordered two Robert E. Howard books, and am very much looking forward to these, not least because they are pretty hefty books with a lot of content; some of which I haven’t read. But also because Howard is a very powerful writer and his stories are always worth the effort.

I bought an upgrade to Amiga Forever and have been using it quite a lot, particularly after I learned where and how to download the floppy discs from Magazines which had a lot of full programs on them. I bought a lot of the magazines when they first came out and, like PC magazines at the time, enjoyed the full software on the discs.

The Amiga (A600) fell out of use when I switched to PCs and was put away and forgotten. Later on I bought another 600 and a 1200 for £20. I swapped the mighty 20MB – yes twenty megabytes – hard drive from the 600 to the 1200. Recently I got them out again and they still work perfectly. I fired up the 1200 and used it for a few hours. The 20MB hard drive has several programs on it: Real 3D, KindWords 3, Bars & Pipes, Octamed 4 and a few games but the program that takes up most of the hard drive is the Dice C compiler. Back in the eighties I was into programming a little and C was the best of a bad lot. I didn’t like Pascal and Assembly was too obscure. C was comfortable.

I also got out a lot of floppy discs for the Amiga and went through them on the 1200. For being over 15 years old a lot of the discs still worked quite well, which was a surprise. I copied as much as I could from some discs to the hard drive in case I can’t access them in the future. (A lot of the PC floppies I have are unreadable.)

I tried creating a lha archive and copying them to a DOS formatted disc then getting them from a PC to my USB drive then I could load them in Amiga Forever but the DOS floppies were too badly damaged – add to this the fact they had to be low density floppies, which was superseded  by the High Density ones a few years later.

Plan B was initiated and I bought a serial cable to connect a PC to Amiga. Amiga Forever comes with software to connect the two computers and transfer files. The XP machine however doesn’t have a serial slot on it. So I turn to the old Windows 98 machine. Great; this one has a serial port I can slip the cable into.

I set everything up and then turn on the Amiga and PC. The PC doesn’t switch on. It hasn’t been used for a few years but it was working the last time I tried it. Bugger. The PC is only about eight or nine years old and it appears to have broken down. The Amigas from the early nineties are still going strong. Survival of the fittest indeed.

Encounter With A Madman

I have an alert on Google Reader for Bob Shaw which threw up a nice little surprise today. I knew he was involved in a television programme in the early eighties but couldn’t find it online no matter how many searches via searches in Google and YouTube I did.

Today it has appeared. The programme is Celebration, from Granada TV. It features Bob Shaw, Byran Talbot and the second part is a short film. The programme is in two parts – including original adverts.

 

The programme is quite interesting, although Bob doesn’t delve too dip into any subject – as can be expected for a 30 minute programme. The story is ‘green’ in its philosophy, quite a nice little piece but it isn’t television. It’s a weird mixture of prose, TV and comics.

Links are below but bear in mind that this is YouTube and all links on the web are never permanent.

 

Encounter With a Madman part one

 

Encounter With a Madman part two

Amiga Forever

My first computer was an Amiga, an A600 to be exact, way back in the early nineties. At the time they were sort of comparable to PCs, but the PC then went on to expand and grow while the Amiga stagnated and went through a few different owners before going kaput.

It was a brilliant machine though, and despite being known as a games machine had all sorts of software available for it: from compilers to databases, word processors to paint programs. A lot of TV graphics were done on early Amigas. They were very suitable for that environment having Gen Lock hardware that could do green screening and mixing of images.

I mention Amigas because I bought Amiga Forever, an Amiga emulator, a few years ago. Recently I have been using it quite a bit and even more recently I upgraded to the latest edition. Then I went on the net and downloaded a lot of programs for it.

The first Amiga magazine I bought was Amiga Computing, and I bought it on and off for a few years until it – like the Amiga – went bosoms up. Although I suppose Amiga Format was the magazine I bought most often: back then Amiga magazines were like the early PC magazines in that they would have full software on their cover discs. Half the time I was buying the magazine for the little bit of plastic on the front.

The Amiga I bought still works – or did the last time I tried it a few years ago – and the loft is littered with bags of the floppy discs, so it was nice to be able to download most of them from the net rather than try and find some sort of floppy disc drive to read them and copy them to a PC (Amiga Forever can read PC discs).

The best thing about them is that they are tiny: they were low density floppy discs – which meant around 800k of data. It’s amazing to think that they contained not only a full program but sometimes several full programs, and I’m not talking command line programs either but full WISYWIG GUI programs. I’ve downloaded buckets of them and they are still under about thirty megabytes on my USB drive.

I doubt if any program on Windows would be able to even fit into 30 MB let alone under 1 MB. And the A600 itself only came with 1MB of RAM. So, on a low density floppy with 1MB of RAM a fully multitasking Windowed OS would run quite happily. Nowadays a PC wouldn’t even boot with 1MB of RAM. The processor ran at 6Mhz. The later models of Amigas ran at such ridiculous speeds as 30 to 40 Mhz. It just shows how far computing has come; we’re only talking about twenty odd years here, not a couple of lifetimes. But twenty years in computing is several generations I suppose.

So I’m looking forward to trying out Amiga Forever 2011, which has been updated quite a bit since I bought it; it now looks something similar to Virtual PC. I’m also looking forward to exploring all those old programs too.

Happy New Year

I hope everyone had a good festive season. It's back to work for me, so holiday's over. I've been reading a lot of short stories lately, the latest, Crimewave (11), dropped through my letterbox today and I've dipped into it already. I wrote earlier about how a couple of Robert E Howard books went missing. Well they've turned up. They were found in a box that had old equipment in and had nothing to do with books. A tattered copy of The Book of Robert E Howard, a very fine 1980s edition (still smelling newish) of She Devil and one I had forgotten about, The Howard Collector, a paperback collecting various bits and pieces from the legendary small press magazine put out by Glenn Lord in the early seventies. I've had a browse through them all, reading bits and pieces here and there.

The bad weather seems to have rode off into the distance (fingers crossed) with rain now taking its place. Luckily the house scrapped through the cold and snow but there were some tricky times. It has certainly been the worst winter I can recall - temperature wise at least.

The credit card is weighed down this month, due to Christmas spending, and I’ve avoided any sales (which are year round now anyway and don’t end when January ends) while off work. Boredom can set in easily when off work and getting into the car and off into town centres is an easy option. Waterstone’s have a sale on at the moment with a lot of good bargains but I decided not to splash any cash.

I’m hoping that post hasn’t been lost over the Christmas break: I’m expecting an important document and a little unsure of how long to wait before phoning up about it.

I've got a new bookshop to investigate: I noticed a car while parking which was advertising the bookshop (probably belonged to the owner) and on doing some Google-Fu found out they've been going for years - established 2005. It might be worth the extra five or ten minutes to get to; I'll find out next time I'm in Kirkcaldy. It should be worth a look at least.