Stop Frame

At long last... Available on Kindle . From the back cover of the 1988 paperback: One by one they will die... Five men and five women. The only survivors of the ill-fated spaceliner Goddess. They think the worst is behind them when they find the abandoned ship, with its promise of refuge. They’re wrong. For the ship is alien, ominous. A merciless cybernetic predator. It has two primary directives: defend itself...and feed. I had to design a new cover as I don't have permission to use John Berkey 's original work. The text, however, is as original as re-typing it could make it, so enjoy! And to all those who have been patiently waiting for this, my thanks.

It's as simple as that. The single worst aspect of owning an iPad is iTunes. It's miserable software, something Apple should be embarrassed about. Most any other music manager kicks iTunes all around the block; Zune crushes it. The only thing iTunes has going for it is the size and variety of its music library. Actual using the software, especially for getting content on and off an iPad (and, presumably, an iPod, iPhone, etc.), is a horrible user experience. I have a substantial music library (280GB and growing). My first complaint with iTunes is that it doesn't recognize the entire library. Gigabytes are missing, and due to the size of my library it's near impossible to tell what wasn't imported. Fortunately, because of the size of the library it may be years before I stumble upon what's "missing." In order to add content to that library, I either have to purchase it through iTunes (generally the most expensive way to go, but I'll admit it's w

Life with a tablet continues to be a back and forth between "I really like this thing" and "I can't believe they didn't do [fill in the blank]!" For instance, I never thought I'd miss the TAB key. I got used to simply formatting a paragraph indent with Word. But while you can do that with Pages for iPad, you can't for any of the plain text editors I've seen (mostly IA Writer and Daedalus). Now, when I work with Q10 on a Win7 machine, it's not an issue since it automatically double-spaces paragraphs; neither IA Writer not Daedalus do that. The result is this string of text with invisible paragraph breaks. Unless you press TAB and manually indent the first line of a paragraph. Which you can't do with the software keyboard built into the iPad. For that simple little feature, you need an external keyboard. Silly, just silly. Other writing frustrations are the lack of keyboard shortcuts for basic formatting. So I tried Pages, which does allow

Reactions often speak louder than actions, and no where is this more evident than in the reaction to Chick-fil-A's owners actually saying they believe what they believe. I'm not talking about gay rights groups stating their outrage (though the false equation that says "anti-same sex marriage = anti-gay" is getting boring), nor am I talking about planned boycotts (which are silly) and protests (which will be intentionally silly). No, I'm talking of the mayors of major US cities deciding that the power of government can be welded to tell citizens to sit down and shut up. That these, er, gentlemen consider themselves liberals is just insulting. That civil liberty groups aren't outraged is sad. If you agree with these mayors it's probably because you agree with what they're saying, but please try and look beyond that. If you grant these people the power to actually do what they're saying, you are granting government that power. One day, there will

The iPad is amazing, I can't wait for my Windows 8 tablet. Contradictory? Allow me to explain. I am not an Apple user, or even a fan. I'm still bitter about what Steve Jobs did to the Apple II. But Jobs has shuffled off this mortal coil and times marches on. I bought a Kindle Fire for Christmas and founding was an awesome tease about what tablet computing could be like. Here was a single device that could carry my entire (growing) ebook library, a selection of music, and be used for mundane tasks like note taking. But as a tablet, the Fire has serious limitations, not the least of which is that for more serious work, it's just too small. That meant looking at the tablet market at large, and the more I looked the more it became clear that right now, there is no tablet market, there's an iPad market. All of the Android tablets looked nice, but all seemed half baked. There's even a sense of baked in obsolescence with several of them. With great reluctance, I turned to

What a stupid title. Yes, that's the name of the main character, but it's not as if it just jumps out and drags you in. John Carter of Mars would have at least identified the series to fans, and the actual first book in the Edgar Rice Burroughs series is "A Princess of Mars." Either title would have been immediately recognizable to the fan base, if to no one else. But just John Carter ? Give me a break. That said, I enjoyed the actual film. Lots of silly fun with at least one seriously poignant moment. Nothing that will bring home an Oscar, but a solid action-adventure frolic once it gets through its opening setup(s). John Carter tells the story of, er, John Carter, former member of the Army of Northern Virginia fighting for the Confederate States in the Civil War. Carter (Taylor Kitsch) has journeyed to the southwest in search of fortune, never mind the fame. In a cave he encounters a strange being. A brief scuffle ensues, said being is killed, and Carter finds him

Once you get over the idea that Prometheus is a prequel to Alien , the film improves immeasuarably. As long as you remain stuck on the notion that you're going to see the setup for how the 1979 film began, you are doomed to disappointment. Cast out your demons of longing, take Prometheus on its own terms, you'll enjoy the experience much, much better. Prometheus tells the tale of a group of researches out looking for God. Well, they call Him "the Engineers" but the quest for God is explicit. It seems that Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her main squeeze Charlie Holoway (Logan Marshall-Green, future victim of ickiness) believe they've found proof of Erich Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods and convince a gazillionaire to fund a trillion dollar expedition to find where they came from, both humans and our creators. They go, they find, horror ensues. Prometheus has all of the visual splendor you expect from a Ridley Scott film. It's a feast for the eyes

Available at long last... http://www.amazon.com/Revered-Memory-ebook/dp/B008AYMD5S/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1339541274&sr=1-1 Book description: Show Less For Homicide Inspector Cynthia Gayle, it should have been an open and shut case. A police sergeant witnessed the murder and shot the suspect dead. Simple. But all that’s left of the suspect is a skeleton. Matters become more complicated when it appears that the victim may not have been human, and go from complicated to impossible when both the skeleton and the victim’s body vanish the next day from the morgue, apparently escaping on their own. Revered Memory  is a fast-paced thriller of obsession, of people unable to ignore the demons of their pasts and are driven to do whatever is necessary to achieve their goals, regardless of who may be in the way. Now I've got to get back to re-typing Derelict . If I had followed Wilma's advice of, oh, 20 years ago this would already have been don

An Apple product has invaded my life for the first time. I haven't done much of anything with an Apple product since the Apple II+. And now I have an iPad. Culture shock. This post is a test of using the iPad and this little bit of software called Blogsy. Typing is...interesting.

Troy (2004) often gets a bum rap. Sure, it’s silly, pretentious, and it takes the entire notion of Greek gods and tosses them into the Aegean, but all that not withstanding, it’s a decent swords-and-sandals epic. The fable of Troy is one of those stories that most people simply grow up with, absorbing it through their pores until they can recite at least one major point by heart: always look a gift horse in the mouth. Any number of people can recite “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships...?” The film recounts the star-crossed lovers Paris (Orlando Bloom, ugh), prince of Troy, and Helen (Diane Kruger, sigh), wife of Spartan king Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson, hurrah). Paris smuggles Helen back with him to Troy, and the cuckolded Menelaus goes to his brother, big Greek King Agamemnon (Brian Cox, double hurrah) and whines. Agamemnon is actually overjoyed at this turn of events, since he’s bent on conquering the known world and didn’t like the peace treaty between Sparta and Troy

Do not think for a second that I will spend a dime going to see Titanic in 3-D. Ain’t happening. I just thought I’d take advantage of its reissue in its new form to review the film, because the only item of substance changed was a starfield . The most memorable ship in human history is the Titanic . If you know nothing about maritime history, shipping, ships, or crossing any water wide than a puddle on the sidewalk, chances are you’ll still know the name Titanic . Arguably the finest ships of the time, she set sail from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, bound for New York City on her maiden voyage. She and over 1,500 of her passengers and crew (out of over 2,200) never arrived. The story is the stuff of legend. The Titanic was “unsinkable.” She was the very latest statement for luxury travel. It was her maiden voyage. The cream of English and American society were on board. The finest employees of the White Star Line were assigned to work on the Titanic . The ship’s designer,

According to the box office, most of the country has already seen The Hunger Games , and that’s a good thing because it’s a good film. Not superb, not quite excellent, but very good. So thank God, it’s way better than its trailers. From the best-selling novel of the same name, the story takes place in the future where the United States has become Panem, a country with obvious echoes of the Roman Empire (Panem is the short-form of a Latin phrase meaning “bread and circuses”). Thirteen districts, kept in poverty, provide the resources the Capitol needs to maintain an opulent life style of leisure and excess. At one point, the districts rose up in revolt. The revolt is put down in brutal fashion, with one district (13) being annihilated. Because of that revolt, each year, each district will send one boy and one girl, ages 12 to 18, to the Capitol. These “tributes” are placed in an arena where they will fight to the death, leaving only one survivor. This fight is called the Hunger Games. H