Weekly Round-up: Now with sea salt!
In our first segment, a writing update. The time travel story is in revision as I type it into the computer machine from my stylish Product Placement (TM) notebook. It's shaping up as a longer story than previously estimated. Here are the numbers:8,435 out of 12,000Approximately 70%My new story in longhand, featuring the return of Corporal Robeson from "Finders Keepers," my Space Grunts story, is off to a solid start. Let's go to the big board:

Weekly round-up: Special Basement Renovation Edition
It's an epic battle to the death: me v. the basement project. There is light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully not the light of an oncoming train on fire while transporting nuclear waste and driven by an engineer whose wife just left him for his best friend after flushing all his collectible comic books down the toilet and having his dog put down. But this project has turned out to be a prolonged sucking of the life out of me . . . much like continually seeing previews for the latest episode of Real Housewives of [fill in the blank]. Big progress over the weekend but not much rest. The work week was the usual mash-up of deadlines and meetings, disasters narrowly averted

Weekly Round-up: No Added MSGs.
So the phone thing. I did my nice and neat rewiring, which didn't do anything because the problem was outside the house. On Wednesday I finally contacted the phone company to get the line fixed. I didn't feel like dealing with people--a surprise, I know, because I'm such a people person--so I logged onto the website which had a page for creating a repair ticket. I go through all the steps and off it goes. I see that it has a way to check the status online, so I click it just to see what happens, even though I'd just signed up. The status says they are trying to contact me about my repair, and if I don't hear from them soon I should call them. I look at my work phone, expecting it to ring, b

My New Printer Adventure . . . Geek Tales Ahead
Let me start by saying the Canon Pixma MX860, my new wireless multifunction printer/scanner/copier/pressure cooker prints beautiful borderless photos, can make copies directly without the computer on, and seems to be generally fab, a welcome replacement to my old Epson, which a bit of a steaming pile from day one.However, getting the Pixma installed was a tad on the nightmarish side. The first steps were prolonged but all right: three test sheets had to be printed to align the print head and other various things. But when it came time to establish the wireless connection to my network, things went south.My network could not connect to the printer. I went to the troub

Outlying planets are not defense posts for inner planets. Discuss.
Outlying planets are not viable defense posts for inner planets. Pick an outer planet. Imagine a sphere defined by that planet's orbital diameter surrounding the inner system. Pick a spot along the outer planet's orbit for its current position. Picture that three dimensional arrangement: a star at the center of a sphere, its inner planets spread along the orbital plane, the outer planet at one point on the surface of the sphere. It's like a medieval defender with no castle but just one brick, carrying it in a circle around his house, hoping that all arrows shot will hit that brick.Except for an enemy stupid enough to fly right by the outer planet within the range of its weapons,