Last Blog of 2009

Last blog of the year most likely. I hope everyone had a good Christmas season.

The weather has been Baltic, the coldest I've known it for some years. The snow turned to ice in some places but luckily where I am the roads cleared pretty quickly and were clear throughout the period of bad weather up to now, so there haven't been problems with travelling, just getting safely from front door to car door.

I have two pieces completed for the Bob Shaw blog and I'm going to post them in the New Year; stretch the blog out a bit seeing as there is limited material to post about. I thought Word 2002 was the culprit of file destruction but Word 2007 is just as bad, seeing as it wouldn't open one file and that file is now well and truly buggered. The piece was written in Word 2002 just like the other ones but Word 2007 says the file is corrupt. So, I'm not sure if 2002 is writing corrupt files or if 2007 just can’t read them and says they are corrupt. Luckily I copy everything into text files as backup so there is no loss of data, although there is plenty of loss of faith in Microsoft products.

I can't remember where or how, but I came across Doom Builder and downloaded it. I played Doom lots and lots when it first came out, including Network deathmatches with other people when I should have been working – the nineties were actually good for something. I remember that the early versions of Doom came with a one player three screen option. You could load up Doom on three computers and one person would have a left, right and central view. It was pretty neat watching demons come at you on three different screens.

Doom of course was a great game to play. I have it on two CDs, the Ultimate Doom and Final Doom. Contents of both CDs are about twenty to thirty megabytes each. I tried installing them but Vista won’t touch either Dos or Windows 95 versions. I have to install them (well Ultimate Doom) on a virtual PC: that works although I have to restart the machine in Dos mode. I wonder how many people can still use Dos nowadays? The exe file for Doom is under a megabyte and the WAD file (where all the data is) is twelve megabytes. I have Doom 3 and I don't think the full installation was less than four gigabytes. That's progress for you. Doom Builder itself is pretty nifty and it's easy to make levels with it.

I’m flirting again with Norton Ghost and Virtual Disks. I created a Virtual PC with the original Vista disk, turning the laptop upside down every few seconds so I could type in the serial number: it seemed like a good idea to put the serial number on the bottom of a laptop at one time. Vista Virtual PC created successfully, only a matter of installing Norton Ghost and then seeing if I can restore either the old XP partition or new Vista backup, although I’ve had that many failures with it I don’t hold out much hope of success. Vista took 4 Gigabytes in file size, which is a surprise as I thought it was a bigger operating system than that. Perhaps some zipping and compression is done to the virtual hard disk partitions by the Virtual PC program.

I read somewhere that the BBC has an official pronunciation of next year as twenty ten, not two thousand and ten. Someone should tell them that twenty ten is not one number but two numbers and is in no way a representation of a year, but, seeing as the BBC are thick as two short planks, I doubt if they would take a blind bit of notice.

I'm expecting a couple of books over the next couple of weeks. I bought a Howard hardback on eBay and months ago I bought Son of Retro Pulp Tales, which has been printed and the Subterranean Press web site says they are about to start sending copies out.

I did wonder if it had already been sent out and lost in the post as they announced they had received the printed copies early December. Luckily it hasn’t and fingers crossed I'll get my copy within a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to it as I spent the extra money and ordered the signed edition.

I like pulp stories and pulp writers (R E Howard, the Doc Savage series, etc) and the main reason I bought the book because it has contributions and new stories by Harlan Ellison and William F Nolan. To be honest if it was either of those writers I wouldn’t have bothered, but both of them made me bite. I'm also expecting my very first pulp magazine to wind its way across the Atlantic. I bought a cheap copy of Weird Tales, but I'll blog more about that when it arrives.

So, that’s it for this year. Happy New Year to everyone.

Email and associated items

I logged on to check email and found that Yahoo have changed the layout of their home page. And it's a pretty crappy layout at that. There was a semi change recently which wasn't too bad but now there's a list down the left hand side of the page which irritatingly changes as you hover the mouse over an item. The delight of checking mail on Yahoo was that you went to email and clicked once. This took you to the sign in page. You signed in and read email. Nothing wrong with that. If I'm quick enough I can still click once on the Mail icon but that doesn't stop the page appearing. And nine times out of ten I get a 'try again' message before it whisks me off to the sign in page. I'm thinking of moving from Yahoo mail anyway as I've recently discovered - because it's recently been leaked - that they're willing to sell your details. The document can be found at cryptome.org.

I would prefer to have my own email at my own domain but I've grown too used to using Yahoo. I've had domains for years but never used the emails that come attached to them. The setting up and logging in to them has not been the easiest of tasks. The whole process is a bit too clunky. Where with Yahoo you sign up and sign in: no configuration of any Email program required. I've got a couple of domain names that are due for renewal early in the New Year but I don't know if I'm going to renew them - I certainly won’t with the company I bought them from. Their renewal charges are about three times what I originally paid. I might pick them up cheap elsewhere and I might not. We'll see in the New Year.

One of my emails was a free upgrade to a program I have. GDoc Fusion. I've owned and used this program for at least ten years. It's a PDF creator and viewer. It started off life as Jaws PDF. I got a free copy (two or three actually) from Digit Magazine probably ten or so years ago. Since then I've upgraded the program (always for under twenty quid) until the last upgrade where it went from being Jaws PDF Creator to GDoc Creator/Fusion. I installed the upgrade on my other laptop and didn’t take to the new program. So, even though I have a full copy of the program now, I don't think I'll be using it much. Too entrenched with Jaws I suppose. Like Yahoo email it's a simple to use program that does what it says on the tin. But the new program has too many unnecessary features. They have to move with the times I suppose but I'm not obliged to follow.

Wondering

… if I've come across my first dodgy dealer on eBay. I lost out in bidding for an item but still received a second chance on it. I decided not to accept it - although there was no option anywhere on the eBay panel to turn it down. Ergo I left it alone. I put in a bid for a signed script from a TV show, after which out of curiosity I searched online for more details about the seller and came up with zilch. That made me a little bit nervous of the authenticity of said script. A website by a professional dealer would be the least I was expecting to find.

Someone pipped me by about roughly three pounds (the auction was in dollars in America) but the next thing I know I'm being offered a second chance to buy it straight away; within hours of the auction ending. With auctions starting and ending at all times people might not even heard they've won something until a day later. It was evening for me when the auction ended, I think mid afternoon in the states.

You would think that someone up to no good on eBay would be quickly found out hm? Not if they offer second chances: which is entirely acceptable according to eBay. You could set up an several account and get others to do the same. The other accounts bid on things. If they don't win fine; if they do win quickly leave positive feedback and then the item is offered to the second person on the list. I know this could lead to negative feedback from people but the chances are low: if anyone won the auction they would be getting what they bid for anyway. The reason for setting up the other accounts would be to drive the price up and generate good feedback. This of course assumes you're not selling dodgy stuff. I'm not saying this dealer is up to anything, just that it didn't feel right.

Anyway, enough paranoid ramblings. This Global Warming . ...

Strike One For Bob Shaw

Bit of a play on words there as there is also a famous baseball player named Bob Shaw in addition to the famous Science Fiction writer.

SF writers have their hits and their misses when it comes to predicting the future – and technology – and some are more successful than others; some are wonderfully unsuccessful.

We don’t have jet packs yet so Bob Shaw can’t point to Vertigo and say I told you so (I know he has passed on but I’m sure he’s somewhere, drinking Guinness and pointing) but this, about scientists working on real slow glass, kindly forwarded to me by Bill Burns, shows that the ‘boffins’ are catching up with some of our finest Science Fiction writers.

First Week in December

... and second time this week I've had to use de-icer on the car in the morning, where's all this global warming: I'm freezing. Speaking of Global warming the mainstream media are still ignoring the CRU email hack, aka ClimateGate, and not fully reporting it, although it does appear to be leaking into the mainstream in bits and pieces here and there. The Daily Express had it as a front page this week.

The USB drive seems a little dodgy; I may have to look into getting a replacement. The one I use is over a year old but I couldn't tell you how old. The drive is working fine; it's just that the casing is getting looser and looser.

Browsing on eBay I was doing a search for Robert E Howard books. Going through them I came across Wolfshead, with a picture of it - an American paperback. I realised I'd bought a copy from a dealer years ago and it too appears not to be on my bookshelves. Damn, what is happening to these books? Are the elves kidnapping them? Cos I ain't paying no ransom.

A right bucket load of Bob Shaw books appeared on an eBay search this week, foreign editions, original Gollancz editions, a lot of them hard back and a lot of them signed. Unfortunately a lot of them I already have. If I win the lottery (assuming I play it) I'll start collecting signed editions of Shaw's work. Until then I'll aim toward a complete collection.

All blogs are individual for this post. I use Windows Live Writer to post to up to four blogs at once, but I do have to log into WordPress now and again to sort the spam out and check on hits, if updates are available, etc. So this one is a copy and paste job into the various blogs.

Element of Chance

Three Bob Shaw paperbacks arrived to add to my collection.

I bought a paperback copy of Fire Pattern dirt cheap from eBay and it’s in pretty good nick.

I also bought the American editions of Cosmic Kaleidoscope and Tomorrow Lies In Ambush. The copy of Tomorrow Lies In Ambush was also signed. This gives a little peculiarity in that both paperback editions of this book I have are signed copies.


These were bought mainly because the American editions have different stories than the UK editions.

However only one of those stories is new to me: Element of Chance. The others have since appeared in Shaw's third short story collection Dark Night In Toyland; Stormseeker appearing in all three of these collections.

Element of Chance itself is a short coming of age story which sounded very familiar as I started to read it, and I wondered if I hadn't read it before. I hadn't but the de ja vu was there. An alien being having spent thousands of years alone finds itself nearing the end of childhood and rebels against joining the grown ups. Bob Shaw uses the term skording in this story, which he used again and developed in The Ceres Solution. I don't think the thanii are in any of Shaw's other works but they may be.

The action takes place thousands of years before any life on Earth and as usual Shaw's storytelling is vivid and descriptive, painting pictures with words of far off worlds and of inside a black hole. The ending is similar to one of Bob Shaw's other stories, Well Wisher. There are a few similarities between the stories, it has the same play on words between story and title, revealed in the surprise ending. It has the same format of a story from the past which affects the future. Nonetheless it was an engaging little story and it was nice to read something 'new' from Bob Shaw.

Climategate

Is the name being given to the contents of my previous post. Apparently as much is being put into it about the (UK) mainstream media ignoring the story as there is about the fact that it shows climate scientists manipulating data, avoiding freedom of information requests and other dastardly deeds in an attempt to convince the world that global warming is real. They’ve convinced the politicians of course: politicians see it as an excuse to tax people, something they love doing, and would accept statements about the sky being green with red squares if it allowed them to gather money from the tax payer. Apparently Google gives ten million hits (as of the writing of this post; I think it may go up) already, barely a couple of weeks after the event and ignoring  - or burying – of the story by mainstream media such as the BBC: who still only have a minor story on their website about it, with no reference to the content of the emails at all.

Global Heating Up

I’m not a believer in Global Warming, I’ve always felt that there has been a shouting of wolf rather than an examination of facts. I’m a big fan of conspiracies in fiction but more inclined to believe they are cock ups in real life.

I first saw this story -  approximately here -while reading the Telegraph during the week (I started getting it when the scum MPs were doing their daily I’ve-Done-Nothing-Wrongs and just sort of kept getting it) and followed it up online. It hit the net and spread a bit like wildfire, being reported all over the world in various newspapers, blogs and sites. Oddly enough I saw no coverage by the major media here in the UK. The rest of the world discuss it vociferously and the ramifications yet the BBC filed it away (online) as a minor break in report . Very X-Files.

Other Docs

One of my eBay purchases was out of curiosity and the book arrived today. It’s The Oz Encounter, Weird Heroes Vol. 5: Doc Phoenix. Published in the seventies and written by Marv Wolfman, a name I recognise from reading Marvel comics all those years ago. The series was created by Ted White, a noted SF writer.

They make no bones about the fact that the book and characters are homage to Doc Savage, and the novel itself is a little intriguing. Doc has to save a girl by literally going into her mind. Doc Savage certainly has spawned a lot of imitators and homage: I’ve read somewhere that even programmes like the A-Team took elements from Doc.

It also has a nice cover painting by Jeffrey Jones – love his (her now) work and have a couple of books containing it, including a paperback edition of The Studio.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to read it soon. My pile of unread books is getting bigger and bigger, and I’m also working my way through Season 3 of My Name is Earl on DVD at the same time.

Ebay bit

Great, I won Galactic Tours by Bob Shaw, illustrated by David Hardy, for only £2.99 on eBay. It’s been £10 and upward any time I’ve searched for it online. I had set a maximum bid of £9.99 for it and it turned out I was the only bidder. Max bids on eBay are quite helpful. It sets a limit.

I've yet to receive it so we'll see what condition it's in when it arrives. I haven't read it at all so this will be a new book for me. I've got more bids on other Bob Shaw books and I'm considering a few others. I'm a bit behind in posts on the Bob Shaw blog, but I don't want to post too much too soon: Bob Shaw did only write a finite amount and I doubt if there are any new works to be released. So there is only a set amount of his works that I can blog about.

WTF

Potential problems with Madasafish. I received a couple of disturbing emails on Friday and sent in a request to Madasafish to look into it straight away. I got a reply this morning but it appears the person didn't even read what I had written, so I SHOUTED BACK. Hopefully it will get sorted out but I'm not holding my breath. It might cause me troubles with my internet connection so I'll keep checking my emails regularly (it's an account I don't normally check on a daily basis) .

What is up with MYSPACE? I try to log on and find that it now doesn't support Firefox 2. I'm loathe to upgrade my edition of Firefox as the new version doesn't support the ftp plugin I have that I use to upload files to my web sites. I only sign in to MySpace (and the others) now and then anyway but it looks like it will be a little less often for MySpace.

The import of all my posts from my personal blog to the Worpress.com blog went fine. Sometimes the picture link works sometimes not, but it isn't important as I hardly ever use pictures in my blogs; the only one I do use them for is the Bob Shaw blog, and they are just links. So it looks like I've been using the blog on WordPress.com for quite a while when in actual fact I've hardly used it at all. Isn't the Internet wonderful?

Update of WordPress

Finally updated the version of WordPress in my personal blog. Not because I wanted to, well I sort of did; I wanted to use the export function available in the later versions. At least all my WordPress blogs now look the same, no confusion now about why a feature isn’t available.

I exported the file in the personal blog and imported it into the blog on Wordpress.com. Hopefully all will go well. I’ll know within a day.

It seems I can’t stay away from eBay, as I’ve put in a couple of bids for some books when I know I shouldn’t. Bad me.

Any Idiot

The problem with the Internet is that any idiot can set themselves up as a bookseller. They just create accounts for eBay Amazon etc and punt them out. Service and customer care can take a massive dip online, although there are exceptions. I’ve been caught a couple of times with Bob Shaw novels; SFBC editions instead of Gollancz editions, ex-library copies which I only find out are ex-library when they arrive.

And it’s happened again. A Bob Shaw hardback at a cheap price which turns out not to be the Gollancz edition as advertised. I now have two copies of that book, both useless to me, seeing as it would cost as much as I spent on it to send it back.

Is it too much to ask book dealers to be accurate in their descriptions? Apparently it is. They punt it out and hope for a sale, ignoring the service to customers.

I suppose it’s a case of that old saying, if it looks too good to be true it probably is. I’ll make it a policy to always enquire before purchase from now on.

(This is the first blog post to be posted to all four of my blogs.)

Added WordPress Blog

I have a WordPress blog which I’ve hardly ever used. I signed up for it so I could post comments on other blogs. That has become redundant as I used Blogger and Google reader more and more, and I haven’t touched the WordPress blog since around January this year (2009). Today I remembered it and added it to Windows Live Writer, so I can post to four blogs at the click of a mouse instead of three.

Interzone 225 arrived today, which is  a bit of a surprise seeing as I tend to not receive as many as I do get. I also donated some money to Wheatus and as it was over $25 I got a limited edition signed DVD (limited to 500 copies) and other goodies from them. It was pretty cool stuff, their new music is pretty good and I would encourage anyone to go over to their site and check them out. They are most famous for the hit Teenage Dirtbag. You can download their songs for free if you feel so inclined but even a token donation would be a good exchange for the songs. The really good thing about it all was that everything came from the hands of the band themselves. No middlemen at all.

An E. Hoffman Price novel arrived also today. I’ve never read any of his fiction and always wanted to get my hands on his stuff to check it out. I first read his writings in Skull Face Omnibus by Robert E Howard, where he gave his memories of meeting Howard. His personality came across well in that short piece and I was always on the look out for his books but very little seemed to come up at reasonable prices. So I’ve got another novel to put on the tower of Babel of books that I have to read.

Too Spendy

I’m going to have to ease off on the use of the credit card for a little while. It hasn't been much over the past few months but recent activity on eBay has been pretty constant. It’s not the purchases from eBay I mind; they are small and you don’t really think about them, it's the postage. The more or less standard charge of around £3 does bump the purchases up quite a bit. And then they all gang up and make a big dent in the credit card. And it creates a big pile of reading for me. I've got a couple of Doc Savage novels to start, one Philip José farmer novel, a facsimile of 1930s pulp magazine Strange Tales plus other bits and bobs.

Actually the facsimile made me go hunting for the real thing and I'm sorely tempted to purchase a couple of real pulp magazines. There are a few dealers out there selling original editions. Sorely tempted but wrist slapped until after Christmas at least. And I’ve got to continue the hunt to complete my Bob Shaw hardback collection.

Plus I get my car insurance renewed this month. I’ve already phoned around for the best deals and decided who I will go with this year and the payment will come off before the next statement. It’s actually cheaper than last year but as it's a relatively small figure I don’t pay it by instalments but one lump sum. I save (around twenty quid) on interest payments paying in a one off rather than monthly instalments throughout the year by doing that but it is a fair whack to pay in a one off.

Bosh Theme

Having invested some money in Artisteer I thought I should use it to create a theme for the Bob Shaw blog. While it can produce a theme from point and click only I decided to invest some time in creating some specific graphics. It’s amazing what you can do in Paint Shop Pro 5 when you have to – boy is that an awkward program to use. I got it free from PC Plus years ago. It may be awkward but it is streets ahead of the Gimp in usability; miles behind Photoshop though.

I have completed version one of the theme and uploaded it to the site and activated the theme for use in the blog. It has been tested in Firefox (my main browser) Internet Explorer (my avoid at all costs browser) and Opera (my try it out and see what it’s like browser), and it looks quite good in all of them.

No doubt I’ll tinker with it – update or change the theme – as I explore Artisteer more and more over the coming weeks.

Slow Ghost

Since I updated my edition of Norton Ghost (I have version 14 and the update for it was fifty megabytes; more than some full programs) it has been very slow when it backs up my laptop to the external USB drive. It is set to create one base back up once a month and make incremental backups in between.

Since I upgraded it has taken at least two hours for every back up irrespective if it was a base backup or incremental. I have checked the settings and it is definitely set to do the base and incremental updates. The problem is that it’s set to kick off at 10 pm, which means a midnight finish. Not the best things for Sunday night. I may have to adjust the settings – get it starting during the day for one – and see if I can adjust it so that the increments go back to taking the five or ten minutes they took before I updated the program.

Ceres Arrival

A fine hardback copy of The Ceres Solution arrived today. The number of Bob Shaw hardbacks for me to get dwindles constantly. The book cost £5.95 net it was when originally released way back in 1981, two or three years before I got into Bob Shaw via his short story collection A Better Mantrap. I hope to get the hardback edition for a decent price one day but, seeing as there are only a couple of ex library editions at ridiculous prices available online, I wont hold my breath. Perhaps things will change in the future: the internet is full of change, a couple of months ago I couldn't see me buying The Ceres Solution in hardback – at all, let alone at the reasonable price I bought it for.

Ceres Arrival

A fine hardback copy of The Ceres Solution arrived today. The number of Bob Shaw hardbacks for me to get dwindles constantly. The book cost £5.95 net it was when originally released way back in 1981, two or three years before I got into Bob Shaw via his short story collection A Better Mantrap. I hope to get the hardback edition for a decent price one day but, seeing as there are only a couple of ex library editions at ridiculous prices available online, I wont hold my breath. Perhaps things will change in the future: the internet is full of change, a couple of months ago I couldn't see me buying The Ceres Solution in hardback – at all, let alone the reasonable price I bought it for.

Ups and Downs

With music and software. I came across Artisteer and was very impressed with it, so much so that I forked out my hard (ish) earned cash for the cheapest edition; $49, just over £30. It’s a great little program that creates WordPress themes at the push of a button. The pro edition had features that I didn’t need or want, in particular additional export formats. But what turns out to be in the pro edition which isn’t in the standard edition are dialogs for adjusting the templates. A bit mean of them I think. It’s like getting a version of Word that doesn’t have a page set up or print preview.

I bought Kerrang! for the first time in many many years. I used to get it quite regularly when I was younger. Always like the noisy stuff. The magazine was disposable; I only have one copy of it, and that one I kept because there was a review of a Gamma concert I was at.

What made me purchase this issue was that there was a promo to get a 4 track download by Biffy Clyro. I like them a fair bit and have bought their music in the form of downloads from 7 digital and other sites. With the Kerrang! tracks you gave them an email address and typed in a number from a card and got the free tracks. Well, I say tracks but it was one track only: the back of the card – only visible after I bought the magazine and removed the card from the plastic wrapper – informed me there was a limited amount of downloads. The four tracks available to the first 2,000 only. Two tracks for the next thousand and one track to the final 2,500. I was among the last 2,500 but felt cheated so I didn’t bother downloading.

Kerrang should have made it more clear the downloads were limited but no, they splashed ‘FREE Biffy Clyro 4-Track download’ on their front cover. It looks like it’ll be years and years before I buy that magazine again.

Ship Of Strangers, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-02482-8

I’ve managed to recreate some of this after Word decided to chew up previous versions and spit out corrupt files, but most of it is new, and all blogs are copied into text files in case Word gets further ideas.

I remember buying Ship of Strangers in Pan paperback in Edinburgh and I was looking forward to reading it; it seemed to be good old fashioned story based science fiction with alien monsters and people on deep space exploration, with weird and wild happenings where wacky hijinks ensue.

The first thing to note about Ship of Strangers is that it isn’t truly a novel. Like Other Days, Other Eyes it is a novel made up of original material and additional stories that were previously published in magazines; in this case stories that appeared in If, Analog and Universe during the seventies. The book is dedicated to A E Van Vogt. Bob Shaw has done a good job of weaving the previously published material and new material together to form an enjoyable romp through the galaxies.

The episodic nature of Ship of Strangers doesn’t detract from enjoying it as a whole and is a little closer to adventures of daring do than is Shaw’s normal novel content where characterisation enhances the plot quite a bit. With the episodic nature of the book, and the fact that parts were previously published, characterisation takes a bit of a back seat to story.

The first few chapters deal with an alien that can change its shape and does just that, by taking the form of a survey module. The ship and its crew face a problem as six vehicles are sent out and seven return. There follows a cat and mouse game with the alien as the crew try to work out what are the real vehicles and what is the wolf in the midst. The twist is that the alien can exert mind control over humans, which turns out to be important when the Captain makes the decision as to which vehicle is the fake.

Personal tensions resulting from the use of Trance-Ports – dream controllers which can appear to be very lifelike and ongoing - are next up and Surgenor (a nod to Sturgeon from Bob Shaw?), the main protagonist of the novel, warns the Captain that things can turn ugly if matters aren’t brought into check. Things escalate between crew members, with Surgenor and others being exposed to the Trance-Port tape – against his will. This part of the story brings out a little more of Surgenor’s character and adds some depth to him.

Next up are ancient weapons activated by accident which then become a threat to a member of the crew. It sounds a bit clichéd I know; the plot has been used more than once in one form or another and not only in Science Fiction. Bob Shaw puts in a little danger and tension and some humour to round off this portion of the novel. It was a little too action orientated and could have explored the ancient civilisations a little more but it was well written nonetheless.

This brings us to about halfway through the novel, and chapter eight begins with some info dump about the world where the stories are taking place. It also introduces some military personnel as the Sarafand, the ship that is at the centre of the novel, is on a planet in a joint mission with the military vessel Admiral Carpenter. They are on a planet where an alien race is, the Saladinians, and, unknown to Surgenor, the military are about to kidnap one of them. The only problem is that the Saladinians can freely travel through time.

Next for Surgenor is the introduction of a female crew member to add to his problems. Something goes wrong with the next space jump and things heat up as they find themselves lost and have to work out where they are. They do but don’t like the answer they get. Things look bleak as they discover they are outside of the known universe and could die in a few hours.

For someone looking for a good satisfying novel to get into the episodic nature of Ship of Strangers could put them off. It isn’t by far Bob Shaw’s best work but it is inventive, energetic and a good read.

Friday

the thirteenth next month. (Just added this so I don’t have thirteen posts for the month).

Unusual Errors

All over the place. I’ve had a look at the Robert Howard books and I don’t see at least four of them. Sword Woman; there was an American import of the Spicy stories that appeared in the thirties which I can’t remember the title of; I came across the Second Book of Robert E Howard but noticed there was no sign of the Book of Robert E Howard; and similar applies for the Dark Man, I have volume two but can’t find volume one. That was the one I preferred, although my edition had a rigorous spine and therefore it made the pages vulnerable to splitting from the spine – and I remember that some had.

The web sites are back up and I’m told that there shouldn’t be any more problems but I’m not holding my breath. I contacted both my web host and ISP in connection with this problem, and my web host have told me that they have fixed ‘unusual errors in both dns zones for’ my domains. This problem has been appearing off and on since at least July 2008 which is the first time I reported it to them according to the ticketing system in their support centre, but I’m sure it happened prior to that; I just didn’t report it.

With the postal strikes in full swing I’m concerned about some items I’m waiting on. The Bob Shaw book from America hasn’t arrived yet, no doubt it is in limbo at the moment. I also have a signed Theodore Sturgeon book winging its way from America too and that will get caught up in the postal dispute. Plus I have a record (a real honest to God vinyl record) bought on Ebay which has been posted but no doubt is lying in a depot somewhere. I’m still going on Ebay but I don’t think I’ll bid for anything until the postal strike is sorted.

Books

I was thinking of bidding for some Conan novels on ebay. So I went to my books and had a ruffle through them to see if it was worthwhile my bidding for them. It turns out not as I have some of them, and would only be getting a couple of books (which I’ve read anyway as I had them originally and sold them off) and would end up getting some duplicates, which I don’t need.

I regret getting rid of books – I bought Ian Rankin’s first novel when it came out and it’s apparently very rare nowadays, but I didn’t like it even though it was a fair read; it was some meandering nonsense about the growing pains of some boys from the fictional town of Carsden, which would have been based on the real town of Cardenden – but there you go. (I suppose it goes to show that Ian Rankin is a good writer as I can remember some things clearly about it, most notably – for some odd reason – their lying on their backs in a park discussing masturbation.)

On going through my books I noted a few things. One, I miss second hand bookshops. There aren’t any near me. A lot of the books I was picking through were bought from second hand shops. I got a lot of Star Trek novelizations and novels from second hand bookshops; a few from library sales too seeing as some had plastic covers. Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, odd SF collections, all these and more were acquired. There are charity shops but they aren’t the same.

Two, I’m down on Robert Howard books. I have about thirty including the Conan ones and there should be more than that. On the plus side I have more Philip Jose Farmer books than I thought I did; around twentyish including a couple I’m sure I haven’t read. I also took a note of the Doc Savage books I have in case I bid for more on ebay; again I don’t want doubles. I have around twenty. For some strange reason only one double novel. I did buy a fair few – or thought I did - but didn’t realise I got rid of all except one (The Fortress of Solitude/Czar of Fear), plus I only have one Omnibus edition. I remember getting a few of those too. Again twentyish Doc Savage novels, including two or three that were written in the nineties, although I don’t have the one written by Philip Jose Farmer, Escape From Loki. I also saw one Spider novel, two Shadow novels, the first of the Doom trilogy in paperback. I came across my old manual typewriter too but couldn’t get it open. A lot of TV stuff: the aforementioned Star Trek, Highlander novelizations, Babylon 5, X-Files, Red Dwarf. I really need to sit and rummage through them some more.

Three, the diversity that used to be in book shops is something which was taken for granted and seems to have diminished. i don’t think we have greater choice nowadays, just greater volume. I have lots of odds and ends that I picked up new in shops that would never see the light of shelf space nowadays. There was the equivalent for second hand books too: odds and ends that never appeared anywhere else except second hand book shops. I know the internet can bring you anything but there are times you want to handle the goods and inspect them before handing over money. And I suppose there are just times when you want to browse. Some of the stuff I had never heard of before and probably wouldn’t have bought if I hadn’t held it in my hands and browsed through it first, giving it a chance to pique my interest and make me chose to buy it.

Grumbling

Not general grumbling, more like corporal grumbling. What is it with some sites? After they have loaded some are still giving the message 'transferring data from ...' down at the bottom left of Firefox with pictures and videos and stuff still being downloaded but no way for me to press the escape button to stop them. Well one site in particular does. I wont name it but it seems I wont go there too often either, which is a shame as I like the site. However, I'm not prepared to have it gobble up bandwidth at every visit. It mounts up. This month has seen one of the the lowest use of bandwidth since I signed on to Madasafish for broadband services. And this in the month when I found a couple of new sites, including one that has links to loads of MP3s. I downloaded and enjoyed the free preview of Tom Waits' new album. Pretty generous this was too as they gave eight full tracks as a preview. It was around eighty megabytes to download and I had to give my email address to get the link to the download but it was well worth it. Not a big fan of Tom Waits; I have one CD and a few MP3s bought from 7digital, but if ever the word unique would describe anyone it would be Tom Waits.

Have no fear the Man of Bronze is here!

Well, three novels anyway. The first of the books I bought on ebay have turned up and I’m looking forward to reading some more of Doc’s adventures. It’s been a long time. I first bought a couple of the double editions way back in the eighties from the Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh: The Czar of Fear was the first Doc adventure I read. I bought lots more after that but I also gave as many away – only a limited amount of room in my house – either selling to book dealers or as donations to my local library.

I got No 8, The Land of Terror, No 30, The Flaming Falcons and No 48 The Feathered Octopus, with more to come. I think I’ll start with No 8. I’ve started reading a crime novel, The Lost Sister by Russel D McLean, but it hasn’t grabbed my interest yet.

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush Part 2, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN, 0-575-01602-7

While I try and rebuild the blogs I was working on that were lost due to corruption of files by Microsoft Word (I’m guessing version 2002 is the main culprit) I’ll post some notes on Tomorrow Lies In Ambush, Bob Shaw’s first short story collection, issued in 1973, this being part two.

The Cosmic Cocktail Party is a little New Wave-ish, starting with the line A highball on the human reality vector. The founder of an African republic is in a ‘tank’ neither dead nor alive, and communication with him is needed for the incumbent party to win an election. Aliens make a simulacrum of a long dead UK Prime Minister and talk about the Galactic Social Congress. They have been controlling humans via mind to mind telepathic probing and the new computer consciousness cottons on to them. This I felt was one of the least enjoyable stories by Bob Shaw I’ve read, but then again that’s only a personal preference. I couldn’t get into it as I could with other stories of his and perhaps the New Wave-ish impression was responsible for that.

… And isles where good men lie. This is one of the longer stories in the collection. An endless caravan of alien spaceships are heading toward earth, landing every couple of ours, bringing with them large scaly monsters that the military of earth kill as soon as they land. Col John Fortune looks past this and reasons there must be a signal directing them to earth, as all the ships are automated. He starts to hunt for this signal with the intent of destroying it and stopping the alien ships from homing in on Earth. Although it is a race against time adventure story it is also a personal journey for the main protagonist, gaining new insights into himself and other people as a consequence of his actions.

The happiest day of your life is a brief short story only a few pages long. Its’ form is very traditional, get the reader hooked in, build the story and leave on a high. The backbone of the story is now a science fiction staple: quick learning, knowledge achieved and implanted in a short time. Shaw treats it realistically: it isn’t universal or free, children have to have a minimum IQ level and the parents have to be able to pay for it. The twist in the story is an emotional one rather than a revelatory one but it is satisfying nonetheless, and the impact of the story makes the reader think.

The Weapons of Isher II is a decent enough story and you can see that Shaw is tipping his hat to E A Van Vogt; even naming a character old Vogt. And it goes back further than that as the bulk of the plot revolves around an old fashioned gunfight straight out of the Old West, but brought up to date in the form of a sport that is controlled and regulated – only one of the contestants doesn’t want to bother about rules. So a showdown is arranged for Isher II, where the weapons have an inbuilt safety feature, which features in the dénouement to the story.

Pilot Plant. This story is close to novella length and is by far the longest and most complex story in this collection of stories. It was first published in New Worlds in 1966. I picked up a copy of New Worlds with this in it, purchased online quite cheaply. The story starts off with an airplane crash and the main character, Garnett distinctly hears a voice talking before a part of the plane crashes into him. This haunts him as he goes through his rehabilitation back to normal health. His suspicions grow as events lead him to believe that something major is going on when his orders for the special plane his company are working on – which caused the accident - are actively ignored and countermanded. While he develops a relationship with his nurse Garnett gets closer and closer to the cause behind the voice he had heard until finally all is revealed.

Telemart Three involves a husband who notes his wife is spending a lot of money and does something drastic to stop his wife from spending more money than they have. As a compromise he agrees to them getting a special television set called a Telemart Three, which can delivery products from adverts direct to the home (I wonder if this can come true; Bob Shaw did ‘invent’ Sky Plus systems in one of his novels – I’m almost positive it’s in The Peace Machine/Ground Zero Man where the main character rewinds so he can be sure of a news report he is seeing on the TV – and there are such things as 3D printers nowadays plus home shopping channels are entrenched). Ted Trymble is in for a nasty surprise when he tries to stop his wife from buying through the TV.

Invasion of Privacy is a fairly long story and rounds off the collection. A young boy sees dead people then he is rushed off to hospital with pneumonia. The father notices something odd about the place where his son said he said people who were dead and decides to investigate. There he sees for himself people who are supposed to be dead and buried. In fear he causes the house to be burned down. In his mind the local Dr, Dr Pitman, becomes a suspect for mysterious and worrying goings on. There’s a touch of Invasion of The Body Snatchers about this story and also some similarity to themes Bob Shaw would expand in Fire Pattern. There’s a chance this could be considered to be part of the Fire Pattern Series, which includes a couple of stories involving The Prince. It was originally published in 1970; Fire Pattern appeared in hardback fourteen years later in 1984.

Overall the stories in this collection, Bob Shaw’s first, are rewarding, well thought out, and represent a good guide to the quality of stories that Shaw was putting out in the late sixties early seventies. There’s a wide range of subjects and themes and a variety in the length of the stories. If you want something to dip into there are short stories that last only a few pages, if you want something more intense and involving Pilot Plant, … And isles where good men lie and Invasion of Privacy are satisfyingly in-depth enough for most readers. Overall Tomorrow Lies I Ambush is a great collection.

E-Bayin’

I got back into Ebay recently. I bought some things years ago but lost both user name and password so I couldn’t get back into that account. I created a new account and only purchased a hardback edition of Vertigo by Bob Shaw – which turned out to be ex library.

Recently I’ve used Ebay a little more, getting a comic – which when I got it and flicked through realised I’d already bought before; most likely from Ebay a few years ago on the other account – a Philip Jose Farmer novel and some Doc Savage novels, though some of the latter are still pending.

The Philip Jose Farmer one, A Feast Unknown, was bought probably late eighties early nineties and might even have been the first Philip Farmer I read (excluding his biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage). It was bought from the Bookshop in Dunfermline, now long gone, and I remember flicking through it and noticing that Theodore Sturgeon had written an afterword. Having Sturgeon writing an afterword was the equivalent of Five Michelin stars in my eyes and I bought the book straight away, read and enjoyed it. However, I can’t for the life of me find the copy in my books. I do know I’ve lent out books and not got them back but I don’t recall lending that book out. I do recall lending out a book of his short stories which I don’t seem to have either. Getting the new copy of A Feast Unknown I’ve started reading it again and have went about a third of the way through in one sitting – it really is a rattling good read.

Ceres Solved

Just found and bought Bob Shaw’s The Ceres Solution in hardback via Alibris for quite a good price. The standard UK shipping was a reasonable £2.79. Considering that this novel has either not appeared in other book searches or been quite rare and expensive - even for SF book club editions let alone the original Gollancz edition - I'm happy with this purchase. It's coming from the USA so, at that price for postage, it might arrive next year, or it will arrive just in time to be delayed by the UK postal strike. :)

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush Part I, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN, 0-575-01602-7

While I try and rebuild the blogs I was working on that were lost due to corruption of files by Microsoft Word (I’m guessing version 2002 is the main culprit) I’ll post some notes on Tomorrow Lies In Ambush, Bob Shaw’s first short story collection, issued in 1973.

I’ll split it into two, this being the first part covering 5 stories. The further 6 stories will be covered in part two. (Oops, 4 now and 7 later; totally blindsided by The Cosmic Cocktail Party.) I want to ensure there are at least semi-regular blog posts at the BoshBlog and that it doesn’t go dead for months at a time. I also want to ensure that blog posts aren’t too long. I’m not a fan of really long posts. I lose interest in them quite quickly. The equivalent of a couple of pages, under a thousand words, is a fine median methinks.

I recently received the hardback edition of this collection. I got the paperback edition and read the stories therein way back in the eighties. By the late eighties early nineties I had as much of Shaw’s output as was available. My copy of the paperback was signed by Bob Shaw, the first of his books that I bought that had his signature on them; I’ve bought a few hardbacks since that he signed. This one says it is ‘To Joan, with best wishes,’ but if I convince myself the ‘a’ is an ‘h’. …

Call me Dumbo is a short story where the dénouement arrives about two thirds of the way through. The rest of the story deals with the reaction of the character to the revelation, culminating in a calculated decision. The classic short story is to leave the reader with the twist at the end of the story, but Bob Shaw takes it a little further for a change. An idyllic setting is slowly deconstructed as the main character feels there is something wrong and investigates further to find the truth. Shaw does a good job of setting the story up and the execution is very well crafted. The pacing of this story is also pretty good although the characters – by definition and a little by necessity to the plot – are not as completely as fully drawn as could be.

Repeat Performance still sticks with me even after all the years since first reading it. This story is told in the first person and has a movie going theme. There’s a bit of Last Action Hero in this, with characters coming off the movie screen into real life, but Shaw puts in the Science Fiction twist – plus this was published long before Last Action Hero entered Production Hell let alone left it to become a movie. Cinema owner Jim is experiencing strange goings on at his cinema, with power outages and strange smells. Local reporter Bill Simpson thinks the aliens have landed.

What time do you call this? is a brief story with more than a touch of humour. Humour in stories was one of Bob Shaw’s specialities and something he did very well. A man planning a robbery is interrupted by a scientist from an alternate reality. Seeing an opportunity to use the other dimension as an escape route the robber goes ahead with the robbery with unexpected results. In truth if people think about it while reading the story the ending may be deduced but there are enough possibilities laid down by Shaw during the story to keep the reader guessing. This is a good little story with some neatly developed characters. That is quite an achievement considering the story is only a few pages long, and one of the shortest in the book.

Communication involves a computer salesman who makes a career – nay an art form - out of not selling computers; that is until a man literally knocks on his door and buys a computer for cash. But curiosity gets the better of him and he tracks down the man to see what he is really up to. The answer is a scam but the scam soon turns into something more real. I really enjoyed this story but felt a little let down by the ending. I don’t feel that it gelled properly, and there weren’t enough clues within the text of the story to point towards it as an ending.

Here endeth part the first.

Norton Ghost to Virtual Disk

I had a look at this again. I have an old computer that has XP on it and I backed it up using Norton Ghost, which has the capability of converting Ghost files into Virtual Hard Disks for use by Virtualisation Programmes such as MS Virtual PC and VirtualBox. I haven’t had much luck converting this backup to a working virtual hard disk. I recently updated Norton Ghost and a couple of days ago thought that I should try it again.

There was a little more luck. Ghost was able to convert the backup to VDMK, and eventually VHD. I thought I’d cracked it when the VDMK was created, in 2 gig segments, but the VirtualBox programme turned its nose up at the files, saying it wasn’t recognised and giving an error.

The VHD format always gave an error and stopped halfway through. At first I thought this was due to file size – or to be more accurate the 4 gig file limit for FAT32; but no, it stopped halfway through when I tried to create it on NTFS partitions too. However, after the update, it has now created a VHD file, some thirty gigabytes in size.

Again, fool that I am, I thought that creating the file was the end of the travails.

Virtual PC didn’t recognise the hard disk. When I attached it as a second disk to an already existing XP Virtual PC it couldn’t be read at all. On rebooting the Virtual disk it wanted to check the volume for integrity. I let it, assuming it wouldn’t take long.

So I get up this morning and it has finished checking the disk and re indexing all the files. Unfortunately it wont boot as a separate disk. It appears to be missing at least one file. It can be read in the other XP Virtual Machine but that’s of little use.

It brings another problem as I was looking to load the machine and export parts of, or the whole, registry. In particular the settings for Sophocles. I’ve done some hunting on the internet but can’t locate information on where the information for the registry is stored: to be exact what file. I know there are various reg files on the computer but they are – or should be – extra files where information too large for the registry are stored. Apparently there is a limit to the size of information that can be put into the registry; over two k and it should go into a separate file.

At least I’ve made some progress using Ghost; from being unable to create any files to creating dud files. But I think that’s not too viable an option. I think the main problem is Ghost itself. It may be able to create virtual disks from back ups but they don’t seem to be compatible with the programs that actually use the virtual disks.

Amazon’s Run

Trying to buy stuff from Amazon but it's not playing nice. It keeps asking me to put in my credit card information. I've checked the details in my account and the information is there already. Previous to this week buying from Amazon was as easy as a few clicks. I've also checked the address bar during the process of doing the order and I'm not getting redirected to a phishing site; it just informs me that the address the goods are being sent to is a new address (not true) and I have to re enter the details.

So far this week I've cancelled two orders just to be on the safe side and sent Amazon an email. First there was the final (?) volume of the complete stories by Theodore Sturgeon, Slow Sculpture (I tried buying from the publisher but they don't ship outside You Sah) and then today an order for the Region 2 edition of Logan's Run plus Logan's Run comic number six. I have Logan's Run on DVD but it's Region one, and I don't fancy messing about with Regions on the computer or using software to rip the DVD.

I just won Logan's Run comic number seven on ebay: there were only seven editions of this comic printed before it went kaput and I have the first five. I actually came to Logan's Run via the comic. It was a bright and shiny thing on the shelves of a newsagent in Cowdenbeath and I bought it and was hooked. They Film/Comic did the story differently to the book and I actually preferred it to the novel. A few months later I saw the film in Lochgelly (Lochgelly had two cinemas and Cowdenbeath, a bigger town, had one; now there's just the multiplex several towns away) and a few years later got the paperback, then the sequel in paperback and then the final in the trilogy in paperback.

Another Hardback To Add To My Bob Shaw Collection

I got the hardback edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush by Bob Shaw today. The package was littered with stamps – well over twenty. There was very little room for anything else.  And they weren’t small UK sized stamps either, they were big stamps. In fact you could call it a herd of Elephants as that was the animal that was on most of the stamps. I wasn’t expecting it for another two weeks or so. When I ordered it there was a note saying delivery would be between forty and fifty days. In the end it took around thirty. Excluding postage it was one of the more cheaper hardbacks by Bob Shaw I’ve bought; a good bargain considering it’s from 1973, is rare and sells for three figures in the UK.

It actually arrived on Saturday but I missed the post and yesterday was some sort of Holiday. (I think.) There was no post delivery but there were collections; I don’t know if the Post Offices were closed or not as I didn’t go near any. All other shops and businesses were as normal. Well most. The book is in great condition and I may refresh my memory by going through a few stories. My paperback edition of this, bought years and years ago, is signed by Bob Shaw.

Microsoft Wurd

Wurd, although I think I got the first letter wrong, is acting up again. Honestly I don’t know why I bother with it. I have Office 2007 on one laptop and Office 2007 but retaining Word 2002 on my other laptop. I use this program for drafting my blogs about Bob Shaw. I’ve got three or four pieces in progress; various unorganised thoughts and jottings for each book. I tinker with them on a regular basis until one is ready for putting online. Today I go to open one of them and it causes Word to crash; thereafter the file is unreadable by Word. The others turn out to be the same so I have to start them all over again. I’ve had this problem before with Word but it seems to be more prevalent in Word 2002. Not that versions matter as Word 2007 wont open the files either. I can’t remember word for word what is in the documents but I do know Ship of Strangers was almost finished. Now I have to start them all over again: there is something to be said for typewriters.

Stupidity or Complete Stupidity?

I got this from a few sites; Ansible (top right hand corner in the October section) and How Publishing Really Works among others, the source is here.

It's sort of caught fire on the Internet and exploded into bad publicity for Richard Ridyard - although he probably wont care. But he should understand that The Internet's Always Going To Get You. A few people have pointed out the futility of plagiarising, as, in this day and age, it will be noted a lot easier and quicker. But some people still try it.  The funniest (saddest?) thing about some of his plagiarising is that he plagiarised Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft! Can anyone imagine Richard Ridyard actually thinking the thought ‘No one’s going to notice this’? Aside from the obvious distaste in plagiarism there seems to be a certain amount of delusion involved in it also.

I have came across a few instances of plagiarism reported in blogs before this incident, so some people obviously think it’s worth trying. Apparently all he mostly did was replace words with similar words and change names. There were some instances of him being paid for the stories; so I suppose he was successful in that he was paid for his plagiarising. He may have profited from it but he hasn’t got away with it, as the furore shows: he wont be able to sell under the name Richard Ridyard again in a lot of markets across the Internet.

Web Sites Back Up

Just checked and both web sites are back up. I blogged the blog I was going to blog last night this morning, if that makes sense.  Compila are not in my good books.

EDIT: The first blog about the Websites going down appears to have disappeared. Was it Google or me? In my anger at my web host did I forget to post it?

A Wreath Of Stars, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-02134-9

A Wreath of Stars is still vivid in my memory, years after first reading it. It was among of the first Bob Shaw novels I read, probably third or fourth, and had an interesting concept; that of a universe of anti-neutrinos. I'd never even heard about neutrinos before I read the book, never mind anti-neutrinos.

The book is a pretty slim one compared to the novels on offer today, not even reaching two hundred pages in the Pan paperback edition – bought for 70p - I read, and probably runs around sixty to sixty five thousand words.

But again Bob Shaw's writing, characterisation and plotting keep the reader engrossed. The science in the science fiction keeps the interest of the reader too. Shaw spends the first chapter setting up the story, delivering background information and kicking the whole story off with the arrival and departure of Thornton’s planet, which can only been seen through magniluct lenses.

Of course the arrival of Thornton’s planet causes trouble and unrest, particularly where the protagonist, Gilbert Snook, is working: as an engineer he is working in a Middle East state keeping the fighter planes of a small air force ticking over. Snook considers himself the human equivalent of a neutrino. Neutrinos are amongst the smallest particles known, and don’t interact much with other matter. Snook considers himself to be the same, going through life avoiding contact with other people as much as possible. All that changes when Thornton’s planet fills the sky.

Quickly the story jumps forward a few years. Snook, now in the republic of Barandi and effectively a prisoner, is informed of the sightings of ghosts in the local diamond mines. Snook himself not only sees the ghosts but takes photos of them; this is his opportunity to make an international story and perhaps get out of the country that is keeping him prisoner.

The discovery of the ‘ghosts’ brings in new characters: Boyce Ambrose, an astronomer who has worked out the truth of the situation concerning the ghosts and Prudence Devonland who was working on behalf of an Economic Commission for Africa and there to investigate African states who had applied for UN membership.

Snook’s actions had upset the leaders of the country and they plot to engineer the situation in their favour. Colonel Freeborn, a military leader, had been introduced earlier in the novel and given the role of an antagonist against Snook. The President of the country, Ogilvie, is cast in the role of instigator; he decides to exclude further foreigners from the country and wait until the media has lost interest in Barandi before dealing with Snook.

A scientific group is formed to attempt to make contact with the newly named Avernians, and Snook and the others go into the mines with a machine in an attempt to make themselves visible to the Avernians. They are immediately successful and discover that the Avernians are aware of what is happening. And Ambrose believes Snook has telepathic abilities.

Pretty soon contact with the Avernians is established and things, for me, start to get interesting. It’s when Shaw develops aliens and their culture and has them interact with our own that his work takes on a greater quality. The aliens in Bob Shaw books are always unique, inventive and imaginative.

The Avernians are unaware that Thornton’s planet passed them by and the news brings a shocking conclusion to the Avernians. A Wreath of Stars is an engrossing novel. I found the Avernians to be an exciting and alien species. The world they live in, described by Shaw, is distinctive and different, the character of the people shown clearly in a few pages and several simple sentences. He describes quickly and succinctly a world totally different from our own, yet so close.

Released in 1976 A Wreath of Stars still reads well; it hasn’t dated (if one ignores that Shaw set it in the 1990s and even names a couple of years) and is still a cracking read. Shaw’s pacing is again excellent, although some of the characters aren’t as well drawn as in most of his other novels, and the premise of the novel, along with the depiction of the Avernians and their world, kept me engrossed from beginning to end. Brushing up on it again for this post I re read most of the book; parts coming back to me from memory. Thematically it may be one of his most underrated novels; that of worlds within worlds, based on scientific possibility. But then he has written the Orbitsville novels and they tower over all of his other works, justifiably or not.

Problem with blogs 2

The problem is via Compila. I tried to log in to my cpanel on both of the domains I have and both give the same error pertaining to disc space. I know for a fact that there is enough disc space available on both domains; one of the blogs hasn’t had an entry for a long time. Three separate blogs giving the same problem, all running different versions of WordPress: highly unlikely they would give the same error. I can’t log into either of my domains via the cpanel but I can get into them via ftp. I have emailed Compila about this and hope to have it resolved asap. I should have gone to another hosting company. I’ve recently renewed both my domains for another year, and I’ve had some glitches with Compila before but this is more serious. 24/7 support it is not. One problem I can put down to WordPress, but not three separate blogs and the both the cpanels for two separate domains.

The Evil in Pemberley House 2

This book, which I pre-ordered in February and which has just been published, has arrived here, avoiding major postal strikes. It came all the way from America in about a week or so. The Bob Shaw book I ordered from South Africa – a stone’s throw away compared to America – has yet to arrive, and isn’t expected for another couple of weeks. And I think I paid more in postage for the South African book than the Philip Jose Farmer/Win Scott Eckert book. That’s postal systems for you I suppose.

I bought the limited edition of The Evil in Pemberley House and it arrived with an accompanying chapbook, also limited edition. I’m looking forward to starting to read the novel over the weekend. The limited edition is still available on Subterranean Press and other sites, but I doubt if there are many left: I have number 141. That’s over seventy percent of the number available -  unless they’re posting copies out and not bothering to use the numbering on the 200 limited editions, but I can’t see any reason for doing that.

Both arrived in wrapping and I’m half tempted to leave them unread and pristine.

The book itself is an excellent printing, and as Win Scott Eckert points out the binding on the limited edition is different to the binding on the normal hard back. The novel itself runs to a couple of hundred pages, which is a bit light nowadays but I’m not complaining: I’m not too keen on really long books. (It took me months to wade through David Simon’s Homicide and its’ companion The Corner.)

I did have a brief look through the chapbook. It’s closer to a booklet, running at 50 pages, and has a piece about the Wildman coat of arms, the outline of the novel, a chronology of events relating to the novel and a short piece by Win Scott Eckert.

The Evil in Pemberley House

I was just over to the website of Subterranean Press and noticed that The Evil in Pemberley House is now shipping and for sale. I actually bought the signed version of this way back in February and it’s great to see it finally released. Let’s hope there aren’t any problems shipping my copy over the Atlantic. I bought a Theodore Sturgeon book that took ages to come across the Atlantic, but that was due to the bookseller going with a specific courier.

I made the order on hearing of the passing of Philip Jose Farmer at the beginning of this year. I only have a handful of his works but what I did read impressed me greatly; he was a fine and vivid writer.

I’m really looking forward to reading this book. It is about the daughter of ‘Doc Savage’ and how she visits a house she has inherited. Going from titbits on the official blog it’s a work that Farmer started way back in the seventies but never finished.

I loved the Doc Savage novels too, although I gave away as many as I’ve kept. They’re great fun to read and show a breadth of imagination from the original (main) author Lester Dent. In fact – assuming reasonable prices – I might pick up a few more Doc novels for reading. There are one hundred and eighty of them and I’ve read perhaps twenty to thirty.

Have A Break

As the advertising slogan goes. I haven’t been online much this week either. I really should log into the social network sites I’ve signed up for. It’s been a while since I logged into any of them. I suppose if I’m online more there’s a better chance I’ll get round to logging into them.

The title of this post is in reference to a chocolate snack available in the UK, of which I have been partaking quite a bit this week, mainly because there are now special packs available that have codes inside them giving free music downloads. I’ve signed up and snaffled a few tracks. There is a five song limit but that is restricted to per email address. It has also caused me to nip over to 7digital and buy some more tracks from said artists and others.

I still haven’t got around to reading Iain Bank’s Matter, and I couldn’t get into the Bruno Lipshitz novel, but I did buy a couple of books of short stories and read most of the Robert Silverberg one, Sunrise on Mercury. I devoured Robert Silverberg years ago. I would read anything from him and enjoyed most of what I read.

Another Book On The Way

I ordered Tomorrow Lies In Ambush via biblio dot com at a reasonable price. Under £20 including postage. In the UK this book is on sale for three figures.  Speaking of threes, the postage was about (exactly; I just used a calculator) three times the book price. I was expecting it to arrive in around two weeks but the receipt says 42 to 56 days. It’s coming from South Africa and that’s not as far away as US. I’ve order a few books from the US and they normally arrive within a couple of weeks.

I didn’t even look at the special delivery option – if the standard option was three times the price of the book. …

So I can look forward to an addition to my hardback collection sometime in October, assuming it’s on track and not delivered before the due date.

Brushing Up

I had some spare bandwidth – a lot actually – this month so I decided to download some video tutorials from Newtek.com to brush up on Lightwave. I got about half a gig of them and I’ll look them over tonight and tomorrow to brush up on Lightwave. I haven’t been using it too much lately, and if you don’t use it you lose it. There are tons available and I just went through them and downloaded what took my fancy.

There’s also an update for JimmyRIG available which adds some features. The Pro version is dragging its heels and I’m getting a bit impatient with it.

The Credit Card statement arrived today. I bought a few things in the American currency this month and I note that the exchange rate steadily rose throughout the month, going from 1.57 to 1.60 in a couple of weeks. I hope to get the cheque off this week and once it’s cleared I can look at getting a few more Bob Shaw books if they’re still available. Also I have a couple of domain renewals due. I’ve delayed their payment so they are on next month’s statement.

Bad Week

Not the best of times this week. I tried to add my second laptop to the network and lost my whole internet connection for a couple of days. It was all my fault as I tried to install the software for the router on the laptop. It ended up ruining the whole network and connection, and no matter what I did I couldn’t get the thing back up again.

I downloaded instructions from Madasafish and setup a whole new connection and whole new network by doing everything through the router. So, both laptops on the network now. Only thing is the second one hasn’t been upgraded for a while. As I type it’s downloading 587MB of updates.

I don’t know if it’s successfully downloading 587MB of updates. Internet Explorer wouldn’t connect to the internet even though FireFox, AOL and Email had no problems. A few bits of twiddling with the options and it soon found yahoo.com. Windows Update gave the same problems and I’m hoping that with Internet Explorer online Update will be too.

The car was MOT’d this week and the price was extortionate. The worst part is that there was relatively few problems with the car, most of the bill was labour. Fair enough a service was included and all work was done to ensure it passed its MOT but still. …

Lastly and most painfully I chapped my finger at work this week. Bloody painful it was and it caught a nail, drawing blood. It’s only a tiny cut but it’s still a cut, and it’s underneath the nail. So it looks like I got purple nail polish on one nail. It doesn’t hurt any more but the finger is still a little tender.

Ghost Hassle

I updated Norton Ghost and it required 50 MB! That's more than a lot of full programs. Talk about bloat ware. And the damn thing rebooted without permission. I was lucky I was running Firefox and could restore the session but that's not the point: it's my computer and my decision when to turn it on and off, not the decision of some lazy programmer who can't be bothered to program in a cancel button. And I'd just spent some time pruning the hard drive of unnecessary programs before Ghost ran its weekly backup. Took off a few programs including PagePlus 9; it's a great and simple to use program but I installed it in April and never used it once.

I tried my old Windows 98 computer a few times this week just to see if it was still going and it seems to be on its last legs. The CMOS battery has gone; the time and settings are no longer accurate. The memory counts up to 64 MB on start-up but Windows sees 200 plus. The graphics card seems to be on its way out too. The screen freezes or the computer reboots. After around ten minutes and half a dozen re boots it seems to be ok.

There's nothing of value on it - I actually used Ghost to create a backup of the drive and can run it on my Vista computer within Virtual PC - but there's a fair bit of hardware in it. Sadly there is little that is of use. The computer was built about eight or nine years ago. It's not even a half decent system nowadays. 1.3GH processor, 240MB of ram ( after an upgrade one of the chips never read properly from the start but worked ok) and 30 GB hard disk. It's great for Windows 98; it would probably run XP okay but would cough and splutter if Vista was installed on it. None of the components would be able to be reused; the memory is really old, ditto the processor. I could use the hard drive in some way but that would be about it. The graphics card is PCI which isn't supported much nowadays.

Hardback Collection

The hardback collection is coming along nicely. I'm waiting for this month's credit card bill to arrive and - ouch - be paid before I start looking to buy further books to get toward completing my hard back collection of Bob Shaw's work.

There are only a few to get now (I must have miscounted in the previous post):

The Palace Of Eternity - one of Bob Shaw's really early novels. Any copies of this one that have turned up in searches tend to be quite expensive.

1 Million Tomorrows - An early novel and hardly showing on book searches in hardback edition from Gollancz.

The Two Timers - another early novel. Very few copies seem to be coming up for this book and it is quite expensive when it does appear. I have this in SF Book Club hardback.

Tomorrow Lies In Ambush - short story collection, expensive in the UK but reasonable price outside the UK. 

The Ceres Solution - great novel from the early eighties. Quite a surprise that there aren't more copies of this available. The only ones I've come across in book searches seem to be SF Book Club editions.

A Better Mantrap -  short story collection and very tricky to get. A few ex-library editions kicking about but I'm not going to bite for ex-library. And they are being sold at quite high prices.

Galactic Tours - this one seems to be appearing more regularly at reasonable prices.

It seems the two hardest of Bob Shaw's books to get in hard back are among the first two I bought; A Better Mantrap and The Ceres Solution. Coincidentally, to date, the cheapest book I've bought and the most expensive book I've bought turn out to be one and the same: Other Days, Other Eyes. The SF Book Club edition of that one was free as I got a full refund; it was advertised as the Gollancz edition. The Gollancz edition was bought from a shop in the Book town in the Borders of Scotland (can't remember the name of the town) over the internet a short time later.

There is also the fact that I have several of his works in hardback only. If I can find cheap enough editions I may get paperback copies of those works to complete my paperback collection.

Once the hardbacks (and perhaps paperbacks) are completed there's the daunting task of collecting the short stories not anthologised: which means dozens of magazines.

1 Million Tomorrows, Pan, Paperback, ISBN 0-330-235273

A bit short on posts here this month. One Million Tomorrows is one of Shaw's earlier novels, from the early seventies.

At present I've only go a tatty old Pan paperback of this novel, bought second hand years ago. The hardback edition is quite rare. Copies are available online but the prices aren't tempting enough for me to purchase at this time.

Even on the first page Shaw delivers plenty of images to tell the reader they are in a very different world: pills to stop hangovers, weather control teams, compcards and a telepres that project images.

The world is full of funkies and cools: functional humans who can have sex and procreate and cools who have 'tied off' by using an immortality drug, the consequences of which is that men are no longer able to have sex or children. I wonder if the writer of Highlander read this novel? The immortals there couldn’t have children either.

Right in the very first chapter the man character, Willy Carewe, is given what he considers to be an impossible offer; to become immortal and still have children. Unfortunately his wife doesn’t take kindly to the offer, thinking it a ploy of his.

One of the consequences of possibly thousands of years of life Shaw speculates is the emergence of the ‘bitch society’. Shaw suggests that the more macho elements of man’s behaviour would dissipate or be forced from society due to what could be lost to each individual. Wars and aggressive behaviour have mostly faded as mankind and men take the security of thousands of years of life over violence.

His marriage broken Carewe volunteers for work in Africa. There he finds that society is forcing immortality on people. His regret at his actions in helping to make people immortal against their will gets him a knife in the lung from a native as reward. The description of this murder attempt in the hospital I found very vivid and how the account Shaw gives of the collapsed lung of the protagonist and how it sounded during the fight was very real and even a little unsettling.

While he is in hospital there is an overt attempt on his life, to go with the covert ones he suspected. Further attempts on his life and the disappearance of his wife lead Carewe to the guilty parties.

There are plenty of good ideas in this novel but the story line isn’t one of Shaw’s strongest. The main character isn’t the strongest or most memorable of Shaw’s protagonists and I didn’t really warm to him on the first reading all those years ago. I skipped through the book to refresh my memory and my opinion didn’t change.

It’s a fairly good novel, very readable, a reasonable thriller with a few twists and turns – although they appear later in the book rather than being spread throughout it – and is written in Shaw’s easy going and vibrant style.

It’s Shaw’s third or fourth novel, and I guess he was still finding his literary and stylistic feet: at that time he would also have been more comfortable with the short story than the novel. It isn’t one of his best works, the maturity of his later novels allowed him to fill out the books with more interesting incidents which advanced the plot and built on the characters and here, in 1 Million Tomorrows, he is still learning that craft or isn’t fully utilising it.

More Software

So I bought JimmyRIG and then I visit a site I visit only every couple of months or so and they’re running a special offer on the software they sell. Including the free items they’re giving away with the software it’s pretty close to half price so I bite.

I’m now the proud owner of Life Forms 4 and two Power Moves packs. I’ve used the software before – I had a limited edition version 3 from a magazine cover – and it’s pretty good. What’s not so good about it is that it’s a Windows 95/98 program, and is not working too well with Vista. I’ve installed it to a virtual disk and it’s still giving a couple of problems. I registered the software straight away so I guess I’ll email for support if the problems persist.

It’s a bad month for me to spend all this money; my web sites are due for renewal this month. I’ve a reminder set for the main one and the secondary one is about twenty days or so later.

Nothing To Report

Totally boring recently. I’ve done nothing of interest yet I’ve managed to spend a fair bit of money (on JimmyRIG). About the most interesting thing I’ve done lately is change the light bulb in my living room. It’s one of those long life ones and slowly dimmed last night before dying with a small pop.

I’m considering getting some more Bob Shaw hard backs. There are a few at pretty reasonable prices ( a fiver, but postage is damn near twenty quid) but they are in far flung places like Australia and South Africa. in Rip Off Britain they are close to three figures, sometimes above.

Still got a few books to catch up on. Iain M Banks novel Matter still at the bottom of the list.

I logged into my domain to make this post before realising I should be using Windows Live Writer. The website was running slowly, which in my experience is a pre curser to it disappearing from sight for a few hours. I’ll keep an eye on it. If it does go under again I’ll user tracert and send the results to the Support Department at Madasafish.

Skirmish On A Summer Morning

I re read this story recently and bits of it came back to me as I was reading. What stuck in my head most, and the part that came back first, was the showdown at the end.  It’s very visual and the writing prompts vivid images.

This is the first story in Cosmic Kaleidoscope and the longest, running to fifty odd pages.

The Bibliography of Bob Shaw has this story as part of a series with Fire Pattern and Incident on a Summer Morning. I haven't read the latter - it's from an issue of Interzone I don’t have and hasn't been published in book form as far as I know - but I don't see how it can connect to Fire Pattern in any way. The only thing is the mention of The Prince, a baddie who is in Fire Pattern but other expositions in Skirmish don't tie in at all to Fire Pattern in my eyes: unless it was all explained by Shaw in Incident On a Summer Morning.

The story itself starts off with the character, Gregg, coming across a pregnant woman being hassled by two cowboys he is more than acquainted with. The year isn’t named but it is set in the old west, involving cowboys and ranchers. Against his better judgement he gets involved and one of the cowboys is seriously injured, leading to a threat hanging over Gregg for the rest of the story. Shaw then goes on to develop the characters and plot, adding mystery to the young pregnant woman and pangs of yearning for a family life for Gregg.

Morna, the young pregnant woman who knows she is expecting a boy, is the enigmatic stranger who enters his life and changes its course. She miraculously eases the pain on his arms and later provides him with a powerful handgun to use in the fight with his enemies – the rancher – and her enemy The Prince.

Another character is Ruth, Gregg’s on off girlfriend, who acts as the midwife and who takes control of the birthing to the relief of Gregg. Soon after the baby is born the Rancher descends on Gregg with a bunch of cowboys, intent on killing him. This is when the Prince decides to appear.

This is a satisfying story and at a comfortable length. Shaw has stated that he always enjoyed - and preferred - being a short story writer but later on began to feel more at home writing novels.

Three Shaw Books

Three Shaw hardbacks in one week, and quite a lot of pennies lost to me. One from USA (Ship Of Strangers) one from Essex (Who Goes Here?) and one from the book town in the borders of Scotland (Other Days, Other Eyes). Only the really expensive ones to get now.

Other Days, Other Eyes, Gollancz, Hardback, 0-575-01485-7

I bought this in paperback years and years ago, and I'm ninety percent sure it was one of the books I bought from the Science Fiction Book Shop in Edinburgh. I recently purchased a hardback edition, but it turned out to be The Readers Union and not the Gollancz edition as advertised. I was given a full refund and I offered to return the book but received no reply. Even more recently I acquired a copy of the Gollancz hard back edition. At an expensive price I may add but seeing as it's one of the small group of Shaw hardbacks that are reasonable rare the price wasn't excessive.

It's quite a slim volume, and can only just be called a novel, there are a few 'sidelights' throughout the book: short stories not connected to the main story and characters but about Slow glass.

Sidelight One is the original story, Light of Other Days, which Shaw in his How To Write Science Fiction book says was anthologised over forty times and brought him in as much money as a novel - definitely more than he expected from a short story.

Sidelight Two: Burden of Proof is about how a piece of Slow Glass is used as corroborating evidence of a crime. Judge Harper waits for the revealing of secrets in the Slow Glass to know if the accused sent to the chair was guilty or innocent.

Sidelight three: A Dome of Many-coloured Glass deals with the personal conflict between the planner and the private and Slow Glass is used as a - very ingenious - weapon in the personal war.

The rest of the book tells the story of Alban Garrod, engineer and inventor of Slow Glass for inclusion on aircraft. As we begin the novel Slow Glass is being tested on a supersonic plane belonging to the United Aircraft Constructors, commonly referred to as UAC. Thankfully they are no relation to the UAC in the DOOM series of games.

After some accidents Garrod slowly begins to realise what he has and Slow Glass is developed and invented. The plot further develops when his father in law is accused of murder. Garrod smells something fishy and tries to accelerate some slow glass to see if they can prove him innocent. However, all does not go well and through circumstances his wife is partially blinded by Slow Glass. Her sight comes back to an extent and she can see through lenses made of Slow Glass. But she wants to wear lenses that have already been word by Garrod, so she can see what he has seen.

I found Other Days, Other Eyes engrossing when I first read it in paperback years ago.

It was interrupted slightly by the separate story chapters that were not central to the main story but Shaw's writing and characterisation more than made up for that.

Slow Glass is one of Shaw's most famous inventions and he has explored the subject in a variety of ways throughout the book. As always he pays close attention to his characters throughout the book, building them carefully, developing them. The problem of Slow Glass and its impact on society is resolved right at the end of the book, where an implementation of Slow Glass changes the world forever, and Garrod is at peace with it.

Web Site Down Again

My main web site is down again. The server cannot be found according to both FireFox and Internet Explorer. I only found out because I was trying to post a blog entry in the BoshBlog.

This is happening more and more and again I am considering changing hosts. It would mean backing up the sites, ensuring database is part of the new host, ensuring I keep the domain name. It would be a complete hassle changing over, but Compila are forcing me to reconsider with the constant outages.

I found out Sunday evening that it was out, it could have been off all day with people trying to access the site. It's not the sort of impression you want to give to people, that your site isn't available all the time.

JimmyRIG

I got the latest LW newsletter and there was a feature on JimmyRIG, including videos. It was very impressive so I went over to their site for a closer look. They have a beta program and I signed up to download and try it. I’m over fifty percent certain that I will get some version of the program. It is amazing. I downloaded the beta at work but the file was corrupted so I had to download it again at home. I got some impressive download speeds too, going above 800kb per second at times and I think it averaged around 700kb per second. Very impressive broadband from Madasafish. The file was 300 Megabytes in size and took under ten minutes to download. I spent half an hour or so with it. The program is hot but it is having trouble importing Lightwave files created by Quidam.

Some More Bosh

A couple more Bob Shaw hardbacks bought, one from America and one from the Book Town in the Scottish Borders. I paid a little more than I normally would - the American one was pretty close to my general price limit - but they are both on the 'difficult to get' list and hardly ever pop up at reasonable prices. I'm still seeing ex-library editions of A Better Mantrap at £50 or more. Some book searches are now turning up Bob Shaw books at £250 and above and a regular basis. Even only a couple of months ago it was rare to see his books at that price. Perhaps they get put on the internet to sell or not to sell on a cyclical basis or perhaps sellers are actually able to sell his books at such prices.

Close to halfway through the month and just now hitting one gigabyte in bandwidth usage. I shouldn't need to even think about bandwidth usage this month. I don't have any updates of software I could download to use some up and the updates for Windows have only been definition files for Windows Defender.

Word 2002 Odd

it of an oddity on my other laptop in that Word 2002 takes absolutely ages to load. Word 2007 on my main laptop takes seconds. It didn’t do this before – at least I don’t recall it being so slow. That computer never connects to the internet so there’s very little chance of viruses or spyware, but I ran a couple of programs anyway. Both only found adware trackers, which were deleted, but the databases would be out of date – as the computer hasn’t been on the internet. There seems to be nothing obviously wrong with the laptop so I gave the USB drive the once over and that turned out to be all clear too. So it’s a mystery why everything seems so slow on the other laptop.

Renew! Renew!

The subject is a reference to the film Logan's Run - the book didn't have renewal on Carousel  - and the content is the renewal of my domain names. I've had some slight glitches with the current host now and then and today the renewal arrived in the email. I've had a quick look at other hosts but none are giving as good a deal as the one I have, so it looks like I will stick to what I have – at least for this year. The outages have only been a couple of days over one year so it’s not too bad. It’s not as if I’m getting problems a lot with the sites. Broadband usage this month is nowhere near even one gigabyte so I expect I’ll be well under the usage for this month.

The Shadow Of Heaven, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-04916-2

I have three copies of this book, two paperbacks and a hardback. The two paperbacks comprise a NEL abridged edition and a Corgi edition. I bought and read the abridged edition first, later getting the full version to see what I was missing out on. When the book was re issued in hardback in 1991 I bought it and read it for the third time.

Bob Shaw revised three of his novels: Ground Zero Man was revised as The Peace Machine; Vertigo was re issued as Terminal Velocity with the addition of the original short story, Dark Icarus, used as a prologue, and Shadow of Heaven, first published in 1969, was revised a couple of decades later and re issued in 1991.

Unlike the first two, which had little or no change, Shadow of Heaven has parts that were rewritten and different takes on scenes.

Vic Sterling is a reporter, a profession that pops up more than once in Shaw's work - most notably Fire Pattern. It might be a case of go for what you know as Shaw himself did work as a journalist.

It was written in the late sixties (1969) and issued initially as a paperback. I bought the abridged version first, then later the full version in paperback and finally the revised version in hardback in the early nineties when it came out.

The Compression has changed the world. Set around 2096 WW3 had scarred the land, leading to the degradation of land for the use of agriculture. Worldwide the soil was useless. Stirling is brought into the adventure by reporting and investigating the deaths of two people, a man and a woman. This investigation leads him to search for his brother.

International Land Extensions - ILEs - are where all agricultural activity went on, filled with agricultural robots. Through a religious organisation called the receeders Vic gets closer to ILE 23 - Heaven - and the mystery of his missing brother.

When he gets to Heaven he finds himself a little bit of a fish out of water, and the place was different to his expectations and his knowledge of ILEs. Vic finds a whole community on Heaven who have been living there for fifteen years, among them his brother. There he finds the only strict law they have: no one goes back down from Heaven.

The twist in the story comes a little over halfway through when a government agency becomes involved, and Vic learns more about the isles and their part in society, and Vic faces a new and different threat.

Shadow of Heaven was good enough for me to read three times. I bought the abridged version and ploughed through an enjoyable thriller. The full version was read shortly thereafter, and again it was an enjoyable experience. The re issued hardback had some updating and re writing.

Shaw creates a good array of characters and sets up a nice conflict between Vic and his brother. A love interest for Vic is also introduced. It's one of Shaw’s oldest novels - dating from the late sixties - and one of his longest but he holds the reader well, constantly bringing twists and turns.

Time Off

I haven’t been online much for about a week now. I had perhaps an hour or so in total. I took advantage of all the good weather here in Scotland and went online as little as possible. Of course, after the good weather there was torrents of rain and thunder. Consequently my broadband usage has dropped right down for this month – so far, no doubt I’ll make up for it later on in the month.

I had a lot of email to catch up on. I’ve also recently discovered Google reader and that had a fair amount of items for me to catch up with too; mainly other blogs.

I note I’m still getting trouble now and then going to my domain name. I may have to look into another host. The renewal is due in about a month or so and I really have to decide if I want to stay with the company another year. They have been great over the years but recently there have been more and more problems; connecting to the domain being the most common.