Apple iPad

Even though I hate the name, I want the device. I have an iPhone, which I use almost continually, and the one thing about it that I don’t like, is the small screen. I find myself continually using two fingers to zoom into a photo, map, email, or webpage to see the detail that I want.

The big screen should solve that problem for most of my uses. The only time it probably won’t is in the car, and that’s not a good idea anyway.

The other reason that I want one, is that I want to put my book on it. I suspect it is going to be a great book reading experience and having my title on the device, definitely cannot hurt. Besides the cover is going to look great in color.

Gun Training for Gay Marriage?

This popped up in my Digg top post RSS feed, and had me scratching my head a little.

Do they know something that I don’t?

Michael Palmer’s “The Last Surgeon”

I received my advanced reader copy of Michael Palmer’s newest medical thriller, “The Last Surgeon” last week and read it in one day. The book will be released to bookstores February 16th 2010.

If you like thrillers, especially those with great characters, twisted plots (my favorite), and villains that make Charles Manson seem like not such a bad guy after all, you can’t go wrong with one of Michael Palmers’ medical thrillers. His latest “The Last Surgeon” is right up there, if not his best so far.

Nick Garrity, medical doctor to the downtrodden, is still dealing with the effects of his own PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) from his military service in Afghanistan, when he is thrust into the focus of a brutal killer after teaming up with the sister of one of his victims. Together they must unravel the mystery connection, and the reason behind innocent medical professionals dying of what at first seem like random accidents or suicides.

The hours seemed to melt into nothingness as I feverishly turned the pages to find out who was behind it all, and what they were after. It was a wild ride, satisfying ending, and well worth the time to read.

I highly recommend you go to Michael Palmer’s website and pre-order your copy today.

Of if you would like to win a FREE PERSONALIZED copy of The Last Surgeon, go to Adventures in Creative Writing, and enter the contest.

I was in a band

Once, long ago, it’s true, I was in a band.

I played the bass guitar, so yeah, I got all the girls…. NOT

However that’s what’s important when you are 19 and playing in a band isn’t it. Truth be told I did have a girlfriend at the time and she pretty much scared the other women away.

There were lots of stories, but one still sticks in my mind.

We had to cut class to leave early enough to make it to the venue. It was a Prom dance for a little town called Bowdle, located way up  in northern South Dakota (oxymoron anyone). Earlier we had used a broken down Ford Econoline van to transport our gear, or a trailer behind one of the bandmember’s cars, but this time we were going in style. My father and I had refurbished an old school bus into sort of an RV complete with stove, kitchen, hot water heater, sink, running water, the works. It was awesome. We spared no expense.

The fact that it still drove like an old broken down schoolbus, was beside the point. To us, this was living large.

On the way up to the event we were excited. We had never played this venue before and it was always nice to go someplace new.We started to wonder what we had gotten into when it took us more than a half an hour just to find the place on our map using a magnifying glass. (Google wasn’t yet invented, so that didn’t count)

We stopped for gas at the only gas station in town on the way up, because we knew it would be closed when the dance was over. We filled the tank, and went to start the engine, but the battery was dead. That was odd. We had just driven it all the way here.

We got a jump from one of the station attendants who ironically had a disfigured face. When we asked him what happened, he told us that it happened when a battery blew up in his face last month while jumping a car. You see the irony right? OK, glad you are still with me.

We played the event, which is another story in itself, and while the dance was happening, we charged the battery, because we just happened to have a battery charger along, you know, in case we needed it. Which we did.

After the dance we set off down the road, and everything seemed fine. We were tired, but still awake enough to keep going. About 60 miles from home, in the middle of nowhere, the bus started running very rough. It was then that I noticed that the alternator wasn’t charging the battery, and that we were almost out of juice. (Don’t ask why I didn’t notice it in the 8 hours of driving that had already happened)

Since it was about 3 in the morning and there wasn’t any traffic visible in any direction, we turned off the headlights and navigated via a flashlight along the edge of the road. When we did meet cars, we turned the lights on right before we met, then turned them off after we passed. Not real smart, but I did mention that I was very young, right?

About 45 miles from home, we ran out of gas. In the middle of nowhere. (Which is pretty much everywhere in South Dakota)

About a half mile away we saw the security light for a farmhouse, so we set out on foot. We woke up the poor farmer, who luckily had a gas tank for his tractors and such, and filled up a few plastic jugs with our fuel. We trekked back out to the bus, gas in hand, but by the time we got there, the jugs were being eaten through by the gas, and we barely got it in the tank before the jugs disintegrated.

One more trip back to the poor farmer to get a jump, and we were off again.

At this point we were approaching the big city town where I lived, and traffic was increasing. The headlights had to be turned on more frequently (pretty much all the time). We reached about a mile from our destination, and the bus just died. We tried to start it by coasting down a hill with it still in gear, but it wouldn’t go. It was as dead as one of the bugs on the windshield.

I hitchhiked into town with a scary movie villain dude guy who turned out to be a friend of my fathers, and snatched a battery from one of my dad’s vehicles.

Sidenote: Right about this time the story of the Uruguayan Rugby team disaster came out. You remember that right? It’s where the planeload of people crash into the Andes mountains and they have to resort to cannibalism to survive the winter. So that sets up the next part.

I drove the fresh battery back in one of my dad’s vans and pulled up to the bus. One of the other band members came out to tell me the bad news. I was too late. They couldn’t wait any longer to be rescued and had to eat Simons (band groupie). We all had a good laugh, got the vehicle running, and drove home.

The next day I found that the charging wire from the alternator to the battery had fallen off because of a loose screw. That turned out to be the source of our adventure, well, except for the rest of the loose screws riding in the bus.

Listen to Goldilocks

Check out my latest writing post on Adventures in Creative Writing. It’s about getting your descriptions “Just Right”.

Failure must be an option

I wrote a short piece about failure over on the writing blog this week.

See if you agree.

Do you have to force yourself to read books?

I posted about this over on the writing blog today.

Check it out.

Thank You Veterans

I never had the opportunity to serve. I did have to sign up for the Vietnam draft just as the conflict was ending, but never got called.

I had friends that were in the ROTC program during college, and went on to fly F-4’s out of Rammstein AFB in Germany. They tried to convince me to join, and I would have loved to fly planes, but I also wanted to be an electronics design engineer. In fact, I wanted to be an engineer more.

I’ve often thought about whether the prevailing image of the military soldier of the time had anything to do with my decision. I would hope not, but I can’t say for sure.

During that time, Vietnam soldiers were persecuted by a public that didn’t want to be in that war. A soldier was not someone to look up to, but someone to look down upon. It was truly a sorry time to be a soldier. Could I have endured the ridicule and shame thrown on them? Probably, but I’ll never know for sure. I’ve never kept up with my friends, who had to live through that time, but someday, I would like to. I’d like to see how they feel about their decision now.

I’m just glad that the prevailing opinion of our military is a positive one once again, as it should be. These are the people that are putting their lives on the line every day for our freedom, and to me that is the ultimate sacrifice. Nothing gets me hot under the collar faster than a liberal minded individual who blasts a soldier on the street for the problems in Afghanistan, or Iraq, who proclaims that young men should be doing other things than volunteering for military service, who smugly decries the military while not realizing the very reason that he has the freedom to say what he feels is because his father, uncle, or someone their parents knew died in a war to protect them.

Veterans, I thank you for your service.

Reading Sully’s Book

I got to meet Captain Sully Sullenberger a few days back at a book signing. I am lucky enough to live close to him, and he was doing book signings at the local Costco.

I went about an hour early, and there were already 50 people in line, armloads of books in their hands, the atmosphere one of waiting for a hero to arrive. Just before the appointed time we heard a bunch of clapping and the message was passed down that Sully had entered the building.

It didn’t take too long for me to get up to Sully, and I had him sign a book for me, my brother, and my brother-in-law.

I also had something special for him. I brought along one of my books personalized to him. I had written the following inside the front cover

Wishing you clear skies and smooth landings

and of course I signed it. I told him that the story had some parallels to his flight and that I had written it before it happened. He said “Great, I’ll check it out” and seemed happy to take the book.

I started reading Sully’s book, Highest Duty, and the beginning chapters have brought back so many of my happy early flying memories, that I had long since forgotten. I’m really enjoying it, and I think you will too.

If you are a flying buff, you have to pick one up. If you are not, I still think you will enjoy it.

Windows Scareware

I’ll admit, I’ve been living under a rock when it comes to Windows software for the last few years, a rock of ignorance. That’s because I switched back to an Apple laptop back in 2005, and never looked back. Once in Apple OS, I haven’t had to deal with viruses (of the computer persuasion anyway), I haven’t had to deal with adware, spyware, and the latest thing I just happened to bump into, scareware.

Scareware is downright, well, scary. I remember the bad old days when stupid popups used to appear when I surfed the web, trying to sell me airplane tickets, hotel accomodations, etc. I don’t know anyone whoever actually clicked on one of those and bought something. I also remember the popup loops that you would inadvertently get into from time to time when you navigated to a site that wasn’t too nice. (Not that I ever did, *snirk*) But those weren’t scary, they were just annoying.

There are some sites that download viruses and other infections to your machine, some of which allow remote control of your computer, but most of those seem rather innocuous when it happens, and it’s only later that you realize after your computer is running slow, that you’ve been infected. It’s sucks when it happens and for most people it’s either new computer time, or maybe a trip to Geeksquad.

Scareware on the other hand, tries to extort money from you, through scare tactics. What happens is that you inadvertently download a small program onto your computer that takes over the machine. It automatically starts when your computer starts up, and hides itself from your view. You cannot edit the startup area to stop it, it’s hidden. You cannot simply delete the directory where the software lives, they intercept the action and tell you that you need “permission” to do that. Instead it presents you with a very scary looking report when it starts that tells you your disk is full of nasty viruses. You must go through the process of paying them money if you want the viruses to be removed.

If you make that window go away, a short time later, another popup comes up and warns you that “bad things” are happening to your computer. At one point it even displayed an image that looked like the computer had gone into the “blue screen of death”. Nice, to most neophyte users, that’s darn scary looking. It looks like your computer has been completely compromised, and might not even boot.

The scareware that I ran into, on a friend’s computer, was called Cyber Security. That’s really a laughable name, because it does anything but provide online security. What it does is effectively hold your computer hostage.

It would be as if you had all your family photos, music, and documents in front of you on a desk, and these jerks are standing on the other side with a flamethrower ready to burn it to ashes unless you give them money, right now. It’s really a despicable way to do business.

I searched on the web to see if there was an easy way to remove it. Turns out there are lots of other vendors that will sell you a tool to remove it, but they want your money as well. So let me get this straight… I can either pay the assholes that put it on my computer and hope it goes away, or I can pay someone else and hope that they don’t put something just as bad or worse on my computer. Hmmmm… maybe they are the ones that came up with this crappy stuff in the first place. Sort of like a tire repairman dropping nails on the road in front of his shop.

I suspect that there are some software vendors the are trustworthy, but which ones? How do I know that I can trust them?

Given that my friend wasn’t exactly rolling in dough, I decided to see if I could take out this piece of crap software in a brute force manner. If you search for Cyber Security on the web you will find a couple of websites that have instructions for removing it from Windows XP, but my friend’s computer is the fabulous(sic) Windows Vista, so the instructions don’t match. However there was enough information to allow me to get rid of it.

What I did, was bring up the Windows Task Manager, by hitting ctrl-alt-del, and kill the cs.exe process. Once that was dead, I deleted the CS directory under C:\Program Files\CS. That is the directory that contains the offending software.

I restarted the computer and voila, it was gone.

I did a full rescan of his computer using Macafee, Norton, and every other virus scanner I could find, and everything seemed normal. I gave him back his computer and warned him not to run anything unless he knows exactly what it is, and not to open any attachments unless he knows exactly who sent it, and why.

I hope he’s learned his lesson, and me, I’m going back to my Mac. I know that someday soon when the Mac platform is popular enough I will probably have to deal with similar things on it as well, but for now, I happy to be in my little walled castle, lobbing taunts at all my Windows friends.