MidKnight Gallery

I’ve been more a fan of the VMWare Fusion virtual windows solution than Parallels, usually because Fusion has had less stability issues (especially relating to one client’s Quickbooks needs) and was just a little more polished. Well, sometimes you find rough spots.

Apparently Fusion assumes the hard drive size never changes. After installing the new HD in my MacBook pro and recovering from backups, everything else worked great, but Fusion couldn’t run the Boot Camp parition. While the error told me it realized the partition map had changed, Fusion would not give me the option of pointing to the new drive.

It was not a difficult fix - I found where Fusion stored the virtual machine file that pointed to the Boot Camp partition and deleted it, allowing Fusion to create a new one.  Nevertheless, VMWare should not assume that people will never change disks or partition maps, and should have provided an option to reset where it should find the Boot Camp partition.

… has got to be Time Machine.

Last week I was at a clients’ office and had my laptop drop off a counter just, just after I’d put it to sleep.

The good news was that the MacBooks and MacBook pros all have sensors that, upon sensing an impact can park the heads on the hard drive before they have a chance to crash into the platters and kill the drive.

The bad news is that right when you put it to sleep, the laptop writes out the contents of RAM to the HD in case the battery dies/is removed, but the sensors are not functional.

So I had one thoroughly dead hard drive.

After finagling around with Disk Utility and discovering I could create a partition big enough for all of my files that avoided the damaged areas and was thus usable, I restored the computer from my Time Machine backups and a few hours later was back to work. Most of this time was spent figuring out what parts of the drive were usable.

Then I ordered a new drive which I installed this weekend. Not ridiculously difficult (say… like a Mac Mini) but I’ll never complain about pulling apart a Toshiba or Compaq again.

Anyway. The point is that I had my computer back in full running order within hours in what was effectively a bare metal restoration. All my programs worked, and all of my settings were in place. All of this as part of the backup system that came with the OS.

Side note. I hate Torx screws. Why do manufacturers insist on using Torx screws on top of the mini-phillips (and even regular phillips) sized screws? The good news. Lowes has a nifty Kobalt-brand multi-head Torx screwdriver that includes T5 and T6 heads for about five bucks.

One of the hottest-selling and most eagerly anticipated products of this last year was the iPhone, the “smart” phone from Apple. The device itself is an example of graceful, minimalist beauty. The operating system for it is well thought out and helpful in all of the right places, making doing anything on the iPhone nearly effortless, even without a manual. Unlike my Symbian-based Nokia with it’s thick tome, the iPhone comes with a small folded pamphlet that gives you the highlights, and assumes you can figure out the rest as you get there because it’s just so easy.

For the most part, they’re right. I’m sure there are Treo and Blackberry users out there that will grind their teeth at some of the limitations. After spending a week with one, I can say that for me, it’s almost perfect. The programmers at Apple need to be thanked.

I do have a few general complaints though. There are also a few oddities that tell me there is more to come.

First of all, there is no selection of text, or copy, or paste. Secondly, if you’re going to allow people to email pictures taken with the camera, not having the phone send and receive MMS messages is a bit odd. While it would be nice if I could SMS multiple people or use instant messaging, I don’t have a high demand for these features and can comfortably live without them.

The first two issues are the most annoying. The lack of select/copy/paste because it gets in my way the most often, and the lack of MMS because it just seems an odd oversight when you’ve included the lowest common denominator (SMS) and gone well past it (full IMAP email). MMS is still very commonly used and since my kids and many of my friends don’t have iPhones yet, how am I supposed to send them pictures? At least with the “select” issue there is a valid question of how do you “select” text on the touch screen that’s easily differentiated from the other touchscreen commands.

There are places where you can legitimately copy or paste entire blocks of text such as URL’s, without worrying about seelction. This brings me to an interesting incomplete feature I stumbled into. While reading an online book, I had quickly noticed that entire paragraph blocks highlight when you touch them. I didn’t think much of it, but at one point when the block highlighted, I kept my finger down, and a bezel popped up like so:

Note the tiny letters under the excerpt of text that say “Action.” This leaves open the possibility of copying or otherwise using blocks of text in the web browser, as well as suggests at least one way that selection can be done for at least paragraphs and perhaps even whole words.

I’ll probably write more about using the phone later.

Update: After doing a bit of digging, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s seen this inactive “action” button. It apparently shows up when clicking in the margins of web pages that have them. Why this applies to the html e-books available at Baen is a bit of a puzzle as of yet, andI have seen no mention yet of other text being incorporated into the “action” button.

My initial impression upon looking at Apple’s 300+ features page was “Good Lord!” The second was “A lot of these are pretty minor.” Remembering that Apple has built its success on making the little stuff work so well it completely changes how you do things, I dug deeper, and came away impressed. When I get around to reviewing it the review will end up being a long one.

Many of the features are actually minor ones, small usability enhancements such as doing a Google maps search by clicking the address in the address book, or the ability to add a new contact to your address book by clicking on an address in the mail body even if they didn’t send you a vcard. Each of these is minor. Each of these nevertheless saves you time by minimizing the jumping around needed to do each task. That way you get back to your work quicker.

In other cases, it’s the combination of features that’s the big deal. Sure, 10.4 had parental controls in place and workable whitelisting that made similar controls built into Windows look anemic and weak. Apple didn’t rest on its laurels, and made improvements. I’m not impressed by “dynamic” filters, but they are now available for filtering web pages if you want. What really blows my mind is that on top of whitelisting allowed websites, email contacts, chat contacts, etc. you can also now control when certain users are even allowed to be on the computer at all. You can also do this from a remote computer across the house so you can centrally manage your parental policies.

For parents geeky enough to be using these features in the first place: whoah.

The biggest deal to me is that Apple, in conjunction with their iWork update, has taken one more step towardsa replacement for Exchange/Outlook/Office that many workplaces rely on. The iCal server integration features offer what 90% of Exchange users use shared calendars for. Now if we could get shared address books (a real one that can be easily updated like Exchange, that LDAP schema doesn’t count) and a Access-like database program integrated with iWork…

The long and the short of it is that it looks like a number of the small features may be small, but they can change how you work in ways that going back will feel like being crippled. Other features work together to be a really big deal. To tell the difference, as well as which features really are just fluff, will take time. To explain how this could  affect you or improve your computer usage will likely use a lot of space.

Don’t expect a full review from me anytime soon.

DWBlog, from the maker of NewsFire (the first RSS reader to hook me before I outgrew its feature set at the time) has an entry on a subject that I’ve often felt conflicted about: product activation. In many ways, I agree with his points, even this one:

What activation allows is for reasonable limits to be placed on licenses. One has to realize that people will try to pirate software, and that in cases of rampant abuse it must be possible to stop the bleeding. The use of activation means that while honest users are given very liberal boundaries, rampant and excessive abuse can and will be stopped. 99.99% of users will never have an issue. In the few cases where the liberal boundaries are broken, there’s probably something suspicious happening.

First of all - I absolutely loathe “copy protection.” In software this is the practice of deliberately manufacturing a CD or other disk so that it violates the spec but is still readable - on the majority of readers - but the “bad” sectors can’t be copied. Time after time this has resulted in disks that are bought and paid for that don’t work on some fairly small subset of perfectly functional CD-ROM drives. Given software return policies at most stores this is usually money down the drain. In the music industry this has resulted in everything from CD’s that won’t play in the fancy DVD/CD player you now use for your home system or in your car stereo, to CD’s that run software to prevent your computer from reading the audio tracks. Some of the latter, such as the Sony rootkit, have gone as far as completely hijacking your computer.

To add insult to injury, if anything happens to the original media – it gets scratched or your 4-year old decides it makes a shiney frisbee – you are stuck, with no recourse, because you cannot back it up.

That said, I think every software distributor deserves to be paid for his work if you use his product. That leaves us with the question of what is fair value and how to best enforce the programmers/distributors end of the bargain.

He’s right. programmers need a way to tie “you paid for this” to “you can use this,” and serial numbers are so easily distributed and cracked that it’s practically worthless. My point of disagreement with his article is the following – many people pushing activation and digital rights management are very restrictive in their activation licenses, and the boundaries are not liberal and are very easy to slam into. There are also other issues relating to activation vs. serial numbers that can make it a pain to use and need to be addressed.

Let me get one triviality out of the way. There are a few other methods of piracy prevention. One that is common with higher-end and specialty software (Lightwave, Nobeltec) is to use a “dongle.” The huge disadvantage with this methodology is the same as copy protected media - if the key is lost or damaged then poof, no software. That said, it allows you to install a copy on several machines that you may sit at use the software at whichever one simply by bringing the key along.

Another method is to not even bother. Apple takes this approach with a good percentage of their software, though not Aperture and their “pro” apps. The sci-fi publisher Baen Books, one of the few to make significant money off of ebooks not only doesn’t lock theirs down at all, but gives away an entire “free library,” the better to hook you with. All of the books are available in numerous, standard, easy-to-transfer formats. If you want to know why they did this:

If I can’t make a living as a writer by the quality of my writing outweighing any losses I might suffer from theft — without trampling all over blind and crippled people in order to stop the theft — I’ve got no damn business being a writer in the first place. I’ve still got my tool box, and I haven’t forgotten how to be a machinist.

Eric Flint

Entire pages of this material on copyright and why they did the ebooks the way they did are available at the old Library still available at: http://www.baen.com/library/ under “Prime Palaver.”

Back to our topic. Our remaining issues are these: What constitutes fair use and what problems does “activation” bring to the table for users?

With serial numbers/etc. if you lose the number, well, you’re toast. That said, it’s easy if you’re reasonably careful to keep duplicate copies of your serial numbers and disks so that if anything happens, you can still install and use the program.

What happens if the company providing the software or service goes away or is bankrupted, and the computer you originally installed the program on had to be replaced or reinstalled? Suddenly, even though you have a product bought and paid for that you can reinstall off of your backup discs, you can no longer use the program because there is no activation/authentication database to activate it against.

This to me is the biggest achilles heel of any centralized activation system, and one reason why despite the weaknesses of serial numbers, etc., I avoid “activation”-based schemes where possible.

Lest you think I’m merely fearmongering, even worse is already happening. Google just shut down their pay-for-download video service. Everyone who bought a movie through the service will no longer be able to play those videos because Google will not even continue to run the authentication servers for the rights management embedded in the movies. Since they can’t verify the copies are authentic and on the approved computer – they will not play. Google may decide to do something different, but right now they are only giving partial credits towards new purchases that expire after 60 days. At least with iTunes you can backup your music store purchases to a real CD that can get re-ripped, in the event the iTMS gets shut down - and your music will also still keep playing on any authorized computers.

So what is fair use? Obviously, that depends on what the software maker decides, to some extent. The blogger that inspired this article obviously “gets it.” Some of his products feature “family pack” pricing that allow several users in a household to use the program without buying entire separate copies. Apple does the same with OSX. For $200 you can buy a family pack for up to five users instead of the usual, one-user standalone copy that goes for $130. Contrast this with the price of Windows, which “mere mortals” like us can only get one very expensive copy at a time. While required to have some sort of DRM for the iTunes Music Store, Apple made the policies very liberal by any other retailers standards: You can burn a song to CD any number of times, just not the same playlist more than 7 times. A song you buy on iTMS can be copied to, authenticated, and used on up to 5 computers. Songs can be shared via streaming to however many computers are practical that are also running iTunes.

This concept is just perfect for a typical household. it is becoming more and more common to have multiple computers in a house. I personally have two: a workstation at home and the laptop I use on-site. Ponying up for two copies of everything just so I can use it as the sole user where and when I need it at the best computer for the job is ridiculous. So is having to pony up for separate full-price copies of an office suite just so the kids don’t have to take over my workstation to work on a school project - one more reason I’ll be getting the newest version of iWork. I’d gladly pay extra for Windows if it gave me the right to run several copies concurrently in virtualization or on several computers in my household. As it is - I don’t buy the extra copies (still running a w98 and a w2k machine) - and MS will get an even smaller cut via Dell or a similar vendor when I finally do replace my computer.

Piracy is an issue that needs to be addressed. The problem is that many of the cures are either only marginally effective, or worse, actively interfere with your ability to use a product you paid for. A lot of software vendors could look to Apple and Baen for ways to effectively deal with piracy without ruining their own image - by providing a better value for the reality of how people wish to use the software they paid for, and being very careful not to step on the toes of those self-same customers.

As a web designer, I get to deal with every major web browser in existence on a weekly basis. As a Mac user, I use two, as a matter of practicality. As a computer geek, that means that I’ve developed a favorite I consistently use, though at least I’m not fanatic enough to draw blood over it.

This is a tale of my attempt to shift my day-to-day browsing from Safari to Firefox, and why I went back to using Safari for most everything.

This is not to say that Firefox is a bad browser. First of all, it has built-in AJAX handling that makes it easy to edit online weblogs such as those driven by Wordpress with a convenient formatting toolbar. I may be a hand-coding web geek, but when I’m writing the last thing I want to do is remember tags. Second, it has a dedicated plug-in and theming architecture that allows you to add some absolutely fantastic tools. Third, many web designers who care if their site works with a browser other than IE on Windows will make sure it works and looks good in a Mozilla-based browser first - especially if there’s extensive Javascript or css changes.

Since google had added a bookmark synching capability, as a long-time Safari user I decided to copy all my bookmarks over and give it a try.

All in all, it was nice. The plugins worked as advertised. Full AJAX support was a joy. With the appropriate theme the windows didn’t hog the screen any more than safari did.

Over time, several things drove me nuts. First of all, Firefox is noticeably slower, especially on an older G4-based iBook like I was using at the time. Secondly, the bookmark synchronization was nowhere near as smooth as I’d hoped between my office desktop and my iBook - often failing if I forgot to completely shut down Firefox on the other machine. Lastly, while they finally, finally put the close boxes for tabs somewhere sensible (on the individual tab), the behavior still wasn’t consistent. Once I’d opened up enough tabs, the tab closure box would disappear off of all the tabs except the current one, still forcing me to shift to the tab I wanted to close before closing it.

Safari might be missing a few features, and isn’t expandable or themable, but it doesn’t use up excessive real estate, it’s faster, and in a matter of utterly personal stylistic preference it behaves more like I’d like a browser to.

That said, I still bring up Firefox to do weblog updates, and to reserve books at the library.

Baen books has completely revamped its’ webscriptions webstore of electronic books. They have also moved their free library and integrated it with the  webscriptions site (I’ve already updated the link on the right), though for the moment it, as well as all of the “Prime Palaver” entries are still available at the old address.

It’s been a bad several weeks and it’s taken me this long to get myself together enough to write this. First of all, my family situation has changed and I now am quite surprised to find myself custody of my son. While this is something I have long wished, like many things wished for, the cost was unexpected, and severe. It was more so for my son than myself, though I still have memories of a week that went by in a seeming instant, so profound was the shock.

Second, anyone who follows Schlock Mercenary, Instapundit, the Baen Web Bar, or has simply checked into the Baen Website (opens in a new window) probably already knows this but Jim Baen, Science Fiction and Fantasy publisher, is dead. The official eulogy by David Drake, author of Hammers Slammers, can be found at http://david-drake.com/baen.html (this also opens in a new window). I also have added a page called “Go With God” that has a letter written by John Ringo in memorial.

Insofar as my more personal loss (and gain), mentioned above. It is personal, and even more so for my son, so I’m not posting long-winded eulogy. Elizabeth has had enough of those.

I wish my ex-wife well, and I will take care of our son.

(This post was originally on the site as a stand-alone page…)

The following was written by John Ringo in memory of the passing of Jim Baen, SF publisher. I’m keeping the text up for a while.

---

I’ve been out of town since Jim passed. This is all I could come up with. I’m still working in a comfortable state of denial and happy to be there, thank you.Dear Jim:Hey man. Hope you can read this. Miriam says she got a big burst of surprise and delight when you died. If you’re up there, you’re probably laughing your ass off. First of all that there’s a “there” to go to and second that you made it.I’m just gonna run over a few things. Sort of reminisce if you will.When did you start to affect my life? Well, I seem to remember a book called “Hammer’s Slammers” that I read back in (mumbledy, mumbledy.) I’m not going to say how old I was since Dave might read this and it’ll make him feel all ancient and stuff. Oh, hell, “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is a fourteen year-old male.” You told me that. And it’s true. You’ve been affecting me since my golden age. Dave, Beam Piper, all those great ACE books.They probably saved my life. You see, I was a geek. A seriously socially inept geek. And when I got back from living overseas, my mom moved us into a tony neighborhood in Atlanta where most of the kids had been going to school together since they were in diapers. I was the outsider. For three years, I had not one friend. Not one person I could hang out with. Nada. Nothing.

Books were my only friends and those ACE books are what I remember. I wanted to be Johnny Rico or Joachim Steuben. I wanted to hunt the forests with the Fuzzies. I wanted to go hunting Merlin on Poictesme. Anything but go to another day at Christ the King.

Then when I got a little older and they started getting dumb and dumber. I didn’t know why at the time, I was chasing girls and playing D&D and reading less since I had moved and finally found some friends.

Hell, for a while there it was nearly impossible to find a book worth reading. I kept going back to those old favorites, wishing somebody would come along to rival Drake or Heinlein or Piper. Something had gone out of the whole book industry. It was a disturbance in the force, like a million voices crying out “where are all the good books?”

I was grown up, out of the Army, married, kids and then I found a new treasure trove. Stirling, Moon, Bujold, Weber and more great stuff from Drake. Where in the hell did this all come from? What’s that symbol? Something red and blue. It was distinctive. I started looking for it whenever I went in a book store. This is good shit, man. This is the stuff.

Things were good, things were bad, good, bad, good, bad, goodbadgoodbad… Then I was in a reasonably paying job, but it was boring as hell. I’d sit in a plant for weeks, 12 on, 12 off, seven days a week, mostly at night. There wasn’t much to do except read and I started raking them off the shelves. Occasionally I’d hit somebody else’s books, but they were all “oh, the agony of the world that is going to hell in a handbasket and cannot ever be helped we are all pawns to greater forces who are malignant…”

Hell, I could read Lovecraft for that. He could at least write. But then there were the books with the blue and red…whatever the hell that was. Baen? How do you pronounce that? Bine? Bean? Who cares. That’s the shit, man.

About the same time, my writer jones started hitting. Basically, I’d read so much Drake and Bujold and Weber that the stories were morphing and coming out my ears. Hey, I’d always had this story sitting in the back-file, waiting to be released. So, one night sitting at my desk with nothing else to do I started writing. Long hand. On a legal pad.

That one teetotally sucked. Did I ever show it to you later? You’d laugh. Some good stuff, some flashes, but… Oh. My. God.

Later, I started on a new story. That one rocked. I could tell. I’d learned from the first. This was good. It was…Bean, Bine… However you pronounce it, it was what this company published. If I could just finish it…

I didn’t. I got stuck. I showed it to my dad and he made some suggestions and I filed them away.

Then dad got sick. And he got sicker. Then he left us.

I can’t say I started again because dad died. I can say I started again soon after. And I finished it. And I tried to fix the stuff I knew was wrong. But finally I just printed it out and put it in a box and sent it off. To that Baen place. Writer’s Marketplace said that the editor was “Toni Weisskopf.” Well, I was pretty sure that was a girl, but not positive, so I avoided he/she in the cover letter. And…well…

It was probably a girl in the publishing industry. That meant liberal. So I punched up the whole “wouldn’t it be nice if all the strip-malls went away? This is what will happen in my book! You should publish it because it’s, like, green and stuff! Because, like, all the strip malls go away.”

Heh. Heh, heh. HAH! HAH! HAH! HAH! HAH! HAH! (Giggle) Strip malls go away.

I really worried about the title. Like the rock band said “It doesn’t matter what we sound like, what should we call ourselves?” I wanted just the right title.

Finally, I found it in a Kipling poem. And I used that to touch it up. Then I screwed up and wrote it WRONG!

I called it “A Hymn Before Battle” instead of “A Hymn Before Action.” Yeah, the strip malls go away. Along with five sixth of the human race.

Did I ever tell you that, buddy? That the title was all screwed up. That I’d sent an “I’m so Green” letter to Toni, who is slightly to the Right of Attila the Hun? God, I’m a screw-up. But you helped me unscrew a lot of stuff.

Anyway, I knew it would be months, maybe a year, before I heard anything. So I poked around on your website (Damned good one, as we both know) and I found this place called Baen’s Bar. That was back when it was a dirty little secret, when you’d take the ladies for walks on the garden path. You remember those days, buddy? Do you remember the Cherry Tort and Wendy? Are you there?

Good days. Days of wine and song as they say. Heady concepts thrown around in the wind of the internet and left to drift where they wist. Novas and black hole theory and aquatic apes. Finally, people I could talk with who questioned and argued without anger or jealousy or “it has to be this way because…”

Do you have all the answers, now? Or just finally the tools to find them? I know which you would prefer.

And you were there, buddy. Holding court electronically in a way you never could in public. You were the guiding star and everyone else followed.

But, boy. Aquatic Ape theory? I remember that one. So Lucy had (they thought) long feet? So she was aquatic? Do you remember my theories? The Cursorial Hunter Theory and the Sexual Mutation Through Preference for High-Heeled Shoes? Hah.

And then I said: “I’d call you crazy but I’ve got a book on your slush pile and I’ve got to be nice to you.”

And you responded: “Marla, find me this manuscript!”

I took it to mean, jokingly as the entire vein had been, that you were going to shred it. I never thought that you would read it.

Then, a week later, I got my rejection notice. In a woman’s hand. I knew, by then, that you were stand-up guy. That if you’d rejected it, I would have gotten something more than “I’m sorry but it does not fit our needs at this time…”

So I went back to work on it. I knew it needed work so I stuck my nose back in and worked.

Then, another week later, I got my first e-mail from you. I wish I’d kept it, but I don’t really need to. Some things cause an editic memory.

“Dear John:

Nobody can find your manuscript. Could you send me an electronic copy? I prefer rtf or word documents.”

Could I? Could I? (Very close to an old joke, you know.) Hell, yes!

I sent it to you along with a very abject letter. I pointed out that your first reader had rejected it and allowed that if you didn’t want to step on her toes, I could understand. That I was in the midst of editing it and if you wanted I could resubmit sometime in the future. Here is that book and as much as I had finished of the sequel (since you had commented that publishers want more than “one hit wonders.”) Sincerely yours, John Ringo.

A day passed on pins and needles. I had a steady job at that point, working on databases at a textile company. I was well respected by my superiors and pretty much hated by everyone else. But I got by. I had a good life. Two cute kids, a decent trailer in the country, my marriage was… rocky but we were making it. We could take the occasional vacation. If I got something published, that would be nice. I liked my stories, I thought other people might like them, too.

Another day. Hey, he’s a busy…

And then it started. One email. Another email. They started pretty negative. They got pretty positive. Nine God Damned emails in 24 hours. Some in the middle of the night. Then the last one.

“Dear John:

Hah. I always find that funny. This is a decent novel that needs work. It is a very good story. You have excellent plotting. There’s one major problem with the plotting and two things you need to improve as a writer. If you change it the way that I’ve outlined, I’ll buy it.”

Oh. Dear. GOD! WHOOOT! Change it? Oh, hell, yeah! Why? Because this guy I’d never met had pointed out to me the things I couldn’t. He had seen, clearly as if looking through desert air, my two great weaknesses and he gave me simple, clear, instructions on how to fix them.

Thanks, man. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Not thank you for publishing me, I’ve thanked you before. (Besides, we’ve both thrilled readers and made money in order of importance.) But for making me a better writer. For giving me those two little things.

(For those who are snooping in this personal letter, they are: Give each character a mannerism so that readers can distinguish between them and include one sensory word on every page. The major plot issue in Hymn is too complicated to explain.)

So I worked it and you worked it and you accepted it and sent me a check.

Man. A check. For writing. That was… just so cool. It was like fairy gold. I had a party for my family and it was great. And I kept writing on that sequel since you’d hinted you wanted it.

Then a few months later… Hah! Do you remember that one?

Eight o’clock at night. I’m sitting in front of my computer, probably tooling around the Bar (don’t really recall.) And I get an email.

Ding! “You Have Mail.”

“Jim Baen. Hmmm… Wonder what he wants?” I, of course, open it right away.

“Your novel stops in media res. You have ten minutes.”

Fortunately, I’d finished it by that time. But I wondered why the short tone. So I opened up the version I’d sent to you.

Heh. It ended in the middle of a battle in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a prepositional phrase.

“Three of the troops tumbled into the midst of the Posleen were from Alpha weapons: Grim Reaper suits. Realizing that they might need close-range support on the way, the platoon leader had switched out all four weapons points for flechette cannons.
Twelve-barreled light flechette guns, each flechette cannon could spew forty thousand lethal steel slivers a minute. Of course, like all Grim Reaper systems, they could also run through the onboard munitions in less than six minutes of combat. Grim Reapers always preferred to be close to their ammo sources.
Two of the weapons troops, through a combination of luck and gymnastics, ended up on their feet and practically side by side in the midst of”

“Of.” I can see you now.

“OF WHAT, DAMNIT!”

So you bought that one. Oh, yeah. Gust Front. Horrible grammar and all. Lord, that thing needed no end of work. One of these days I need to sit down and line edit the damned thing for a new edition. But you saw through that to the shining core. That was your great strength in this industry, man. You could see the core. Dave, Lois, Elizabeth, Eric… me, you could see that shining core where others had gone “Oh, hell no.” “Where’s the hook?” “This is far too violent for our market.” “This does not meet our needs at this time…” People who had walked away from HOW many Hugos? HOW much sell through? HOW many copies sold? Dumbasses. Losers all.

That was when you started hinting. You had that Baen thing. Team a new writer with a more experienced one. Did you know how strong an idea that was by then? We don’t just get a better market. We don’t just learn more about the mechanics of writing, about plotting and characters and prose. Those “higher” authors act as mentors on everything from dealing with fans to… well, okay, dealing with you on a bad hair day. You know how you were.

So you started hinting. There was a “high mid-list writer” who was considering teaming with me. Hmmm…

Lois Bujold? Not in a million years. She didn’t do teams. Dave Drake? Strong possibility. He did the team thing a lot. Eric Flint? Maybe. I could probably learn some stuff but I wouldn’t get much market, he was nearly as newbie as me. David Weber? No way. He hadn’t been doing the team thing and there was no way that the author of Honor Harrington was EVER gonna stoop to do books with me.

I mean, I was a major league David Weber fan. Huge. Not just Honor Harrington but all his stuff. The Armageddon Inheritance (how stoned was he to come up with the moon being a giant space ship?). Starfire. Path of the Fury. This guy was one of the best writers in the WORLD. And he never teamed.

Then I was on my way back from a dive trip. It had been a very bad trip. I was diving for the first time in years and the first time since I nearly died caving. And it wasn’t good. I had constant panic attacks. Diving, which had been one my few great pleasures in life, might just have become a thing of the past. Not a good weekend.

We were driving back in the middle of nowhere in Alabama and by very circuitous ways found out that you’d called. You wanted to talk to me. We stopped at a payphone. I called the number.

Now, to that point, I’d never spoken to you. Remember? It had all been emails and the occasional contract or check. There I was, talking with Jim Baen.

“Johnny! It’s good to talk to you!”

“Thank you, Mr. Baen.” Normally, I hated people calling me Johnny. I had an instinctive desire to ask you not to. But I didn’t for two reasons. One, you were going to publish my books. Two… with you, for the first time in my life, I didn’t mind. I respected you and if you wanted to call me Johnny I had no issues with it.

“Johnny, I wanted to talk to you about maybe doing a collaboration. There’s a more senior writer who has said he’d be interested in writing with you. Are you still interested?”

“Of course, Mr. Baen.” God, you loved dragging it out, didn’t you? Sadist.

“So, would you be willing to do a book with David Weber?”

DAVID WEBER?????

“Uh…urk…uh…it would be an honor… uh…”

“I’ve learned in this industry to ask for a very clear yes or no.”

“In that case, YES!”

Heady days of wine and song indeed. Memories, so many memories. The first time we met, WorldCon 2000. Images burned on my brain. Sitting on the deck in North Carolina talking of cabbages and kings.

I miss you, man. You didn’t believe in all this heaven and hell stuff. You said that when a person was gone they were just gone.

But who is it that says:

“A man is not dead until the last bottle of wine he made is drunk, until the last person who remembers him is gone…”

Even if you’re not able to read this, you won’t be truly dead until the last reader reads the last of the many people, including me, that you found and got started in this industry.

You will never die as long as you are in my heart.

I love you, Jim, and Miriam and I miss you terribly. I just want to pick up the phone one more time and ask Marla: “Is Jimbo in?” and have her say “Let me see if he’s up.”

Take care, man. Say hello to Robert for all of us and if you happen across my dad tell him “Thanks” for figuring out how to get the ACS out from under the building.

Goodbye. Goodbye my replacement father, my publisher, my mentor and my friend.

Go with God.

Saw the latest in the Harry Potter installments tonight. It was a worthy installment in the series, and has taken a significantly darker turn as it follows the arc set by the books. The story is more intense, the romantic aspects of the story are well handled, and most of the shortcuts taken to condense the story are well thought out and graceful. Most, I say, because the whole plot thread with the obnoxious reporter was simply left dangling.

The one real complaint I do have was the pacing and the choppy editing. It didn’t flow as effortlessly as Azkaban did.