Work Has Started

Fresh from the success of In the Mission, I decided to start working on the novel’s successor. There were so many loose ends in the first installment, it almost felt like the first Matrix movie – the story and the plot made sense on their own, but you just wanted to know what happened after that. It’s funny how every reader seems to pick up on a different “loose end:” There is the story of the Archbishop who proposes an exchange because he thinks the kidnappers are really after him – one reader wanted to know what happened with that before any other comment. Continue reading

The Two Numbers We Need

I have spoken with many friends about super-taxing the super-rich (according to the Democrats, that’s anyone that makes more than $250,000 a year after deductions). I have heard many different opinions as to why that’s a good thing or a bad thing. In the end, I decided I need more information to make a decision; in particular, I need two numbers. The first number is an easy one to get: What percentage of the wealth of the super-rich is invested outside this country? Continue reading

Why is Duck Diving so Hard?

I am not the fastest learner when it comes to surfing. I have been slogging it up for the past 8 months, inching forward, looking admiringly at the divinities of surfdom that treat a mass of water like I would a snow-covered slope. But no, things have to be figured out piecemeal, and while every time I go I feel a little better, I feel a lot like my aunt: recovering from a stroke, she gained her mobility day by day, but while the differences were very noticeable every time I visited, she was frustrated because it was too slow. Continue reading

Blocked IP Addresses

This is an ongoing post, in which I record the IP addresses I had to ban on this server because of serious abuse/spam. I am posting this mostly so that I have a backup in case I reboot the server – but I sense that more people will find this list useful. The following is the output of iptables -L -n on this server. Updates as required. Each IP address in this list has submitted more than 1000 requests for comments in RSGallery within a single day. Continue reading

Stingray Sting

[Image hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons] So, last year, in my continuing quest not to be San Diego’s Worst Surfer, I took one step too far. In particular, the step led me onto a stingray, a lovely little creature that (understandably) is not too fond of being stepped on. Unfortunately, it decides to make its point by stinging (hence the name) and injecting a venom into your flesh. It all happened very quickly, yet felt like a slow motion movie. Continue reading

New Digs

What do you know? I will have to move again. Sick of living near UCSD (mostly because students don’t typically make for good neighbors), I am moving with all the belongings to Pacific Beach, the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of San Diego right South of tony and zany La Jolla. Why Pacific Beach? I hadn’t set my mind and was open to any neighborhood close to the ocean, and Pacific Beach just had the best combination of places for me. Continue reading

The Most Overpriced Gadget (tMOG): Denon Ultra Premium Link Cable

Ah, what a pleasure! If I feel down one day because the weather is bad or because my novel didn’t sell as well as I thought, I just go to the nearest electronics store and laugh my behind off looking at the phony prices for accessories there. I mean, seriously, you expect me to pay $40 for the case to a phone that barely cost $100? That’s ludicrous! Well, Slashdot had an article about HDMI cables and how even retailers are now starting to crack the scam barrier there. Continue reading

Hopefully I become the universe.

The last words on the note Seth Walsh left for his family before committing suicide. A very sad story, of a loving mother and a loving family, and a child that was so terrified by the bullying he experienced that he called his environment, “this s—hole.” The mother accused the school district of not doing anything/enough to help her son, who was being bullied and harassed in his school in ultra-conservative Kern County. Continue reading

The Information Revolution Has Not Arrived Yet

Some of you may remember Al Gore’s claim he had invented the Internet. Well, the claim was never made that way, and Al Gore’s role in commercializing the Internet made out of a government playground what we know today, so he may have had a little to boast about. The other thing he was talking about, though, never really came to be. That’s the Information Superhighway. It was supposed to deliver information at your fingertips, and for some things (like cheap watches) it works even too well. Continue reading

More Comment Spammers and How to Block Them

After I shut out a comment spammer that had blasted my account to the tune of 23.76 GB (I am nothing but precise), I discovered another IP address up to no good, and then a series of them. They are all from Russia (not sure why, and no disparagement of the great country intended), most of them from a single IP block. Not to the recipe: if you want to get rid of a particularly annoying spammer, you need to do two things: Continue reading