Optimism

"This VCR will accurately maintain its calendar up to Dec. 31, 2096, 11:59 PM."
-- Panasonic Omnivision VHS Model PV-8451 Operating Instructions

Jeter! 

Belatedly

Been to Mexico. Returning to France, my gall bladder melted down and was removed. A pretty routine operation, made somewhat more interesting by the fact that most of the people involved didn't speak English. But more on that later.

And Herself and her fille have taken up residence in my apartment. So the question of the hour is: How often can I ask "So, how long did you say you were staying?" before I get slugged? Ten days and counting.

That byline again

I just had another piece published in the IHT, here. I interviewed a couple folks from the science-fiction field to write it, which was fine, but could only use a fraction of what I got, which was frustrating. But it's a fill-in column, and the space is fixed -- you can't get even one extra line. I suppose I could put together a "director's cut" for, say, the SFWA Bulletin.

The other one

Here's the other little product announcement I did for the IHT. It was published on March 19. Unlike the phone, I actually bought this gizmo. And the paper paid me enough for this piece to actually recoup most of the VAT the French authorities slapped on it, oboy. Here it is:

If your bookshelves are bulging, the IntelliScanner bar-code reader can help you catalogue your collection. The scanner itself is about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Once you have purchased the scanner, you must visit the Web site of the manufacturer, Intelli Innovations, and download any of several software packages, including Media Collector (for books, DVDs, CDs and video games), Wine Collector or more specialized programs intended for businesses and heavy-duty online auctioneers.

After the software has been configured, you read the bar codes of your old papery media and shiny new media with the IntelliScanner. The scanner transmits the codes to your PC or Mac via a Bluetooth connection, your computer hunts in Intelli's online archive for the corresponding data, and on your screen appears a wealth of information on each item, including author, title, publisher, price and genre (for books); artist, label and track list (for CDs); and stars, distributor, format and theatrical release date (for DVDs) - plus the cover for each book and disc.

You can tailor the list to include or exclude any of three dozen fields of data. For peripatetic types, the "location" field will be of particular interest; you can indicate whether that copy of "A Moveable Feast" is on a shelf in Paris or in Pop's attic in Peoria, Illinois.

The IntelliScanner is available at www.intellisw.com for $299.

Gadget review

I've published two short gizmo reviews in the International Herald Tribune in recent months. Well, they're more product notices than reviews. I'd point you to the URLs, but the IHT search function is a little dotty today. Here's one of the reviews, before minor trims and copy edits:

Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone

The latest cellphone from Spark Fun Electronics does not feature MPEG-4 video playback. It does not have a VGA camera with digital zoom, nor Bluetooth wireless capability. It does not have even one color display, let alone two, and it is not sheathed in anodized aluminum. If you want those features, you'll have to buy a Motorola RAZR V3 cellphone.

What the Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone has is heft. Lots of heft. About two pounds of it, against the RAZR's 3.26 ounces. The Spark Fun also has a rotary dial, a thick black plastic casing and a coiled cord, all of which the RAZR lacks. And while the RAZR may have a certain bling factor, the Spark Fun has a ring factor -- as in clanging metal bells, for those tired of the "Crazy Frog Axel F" ringtone.

Spark Fun, a Colorado company founded in 2002 by some college students, takes old-style rotary phones and retrofits them with a custom-made circuit board, an off-the-shelf but expensive cellular module and a hand-built ringer circuit to bring 1950s technology gasping and wheezing into the 21st century. To make the phone go, all you have to do is insert the SIM chip from your overcomplicated, delicate, fly-weight, easy-to-lose cellphone. Spark Fun says the Portable Rotary will work with 90 percent of the world's cellular systems.

Spark Fun (at www.sparkfun.com) sells its phone for just $399, a bargain compared to the RAZR's list price of $599. And when you consider the price per pound, the Portable Rotary Phone's cost advantage becomes even more obvious.

Hey, kids, let's put on a show!

Watch this.

Then send Andy Bobrow money so he can do another one.

User Manual

Instructions: The 12-in-1 PCMCIA Adapter is easy to use. Simply insert your Sony MemoryStick, xD PictureCard, SmartMedia Card or SecureDigital miniSD card into the adapter, then remove it once you have transferred the data to your computer. (Hammer and screwdriver not included.)  

Remaining true to their heritage

Lisbon. That Peruvian flute music you can't get away from these days, no matter where you go. And American Indian headresses. Okay. Well, Paris has a chain of Indian-themed restaurants called Indiana.

They do things behind my back

As I am wont to do, after I got home from work last night I settled down on the couch with a DVD (from the second season of Babylon 5) and the ThinkPad, because of course I can't remain fully absorbed by just the DVD and snacking, I also have to be playing Risk and occasionally checking e-mail, and surfing. (The web-surfing is usually related to the DVD. Like, "Hmm, I wonder what Mira Furlan has been doing since the last B5 movie. And who's that guy who plays Kosh?")

I was using wi-fi again for this, of course, which is how I noticed that the long-running problem of the ThinkPad's wireless gimcrackery bogging down my CPU had somehow resolved itself. I'm wireless right now, and the CPU usage is flickering between 2 percent and 15 percent, rather than spiking at 80 or 90 percent, as it had been. I hadn't done a thing to bring this about, unless you count thinking really hard about uninstalling all the IBM wireless software and using Windows XP's.

Meanwhile, all the tasks on my Palm Tungsten E spontaneously put themselves into different categories. Rather than wait for them to put themselves right again, as the ThinkPad had, I put them back myself. Took 25 minutes. Then I backed up all the data on an SD card. Then I ran a HotSync.

The PDAs are usually well-behaved (though short-lived: I've somehow killed two Sony T615Cs, and my Tungsten T3 died, too, though it seems to have resurrected itself), but Windows machines just do stuff. We've all experienced it. You go away from the machine for a half-hour, come back, and the disk drive is just whirring away like crazy. "What are you doing!?" But of course it never tells you.

It's a small world after all

And now you will have that tune running through your head for the rest of the day, demonstrating the fearsome power of the Internet.

It's pretty cool when you can read about some software in a book (a book I saw reviewed on the Internet, although in this case I bought it at Brentano's, not Amazon), order and download the software, and then have the creator show up in your blog. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see evidence a stranger has passed through here, since a lot of my friends don't, ferchrissakes. The best bit of Internet serendipity came a couple years ago, when my long lost half-sister e-mailed me after a distant relative stumbled across my main and sadly neglected site.

This whole blogging thing would be even more interesting, of course, if the entries concerned, say, the completion of my 23rd novel, or my new deal with Dreamworks. Or perhaps not necessarily more interesting: Kevin Smith has a blog and his topics include the quality of his bowel movements (also spoilers on "Revenge of the Sith," so read with care).

Another Internet-related goodie that showed up this week: Yet another once-in-a-lifetime moneymaking opportunity from a Nigerian lawyer representing the estate of an oil executive who died in a car crash. The roads of Nigeria must be littered with the carcasses of intestate millionaires. Hard to believe people fall for these scams, but they do. And I have a vision of half the population of Nigeria hunched over their keyboards every night, sending out e-mails to unsuspecting Westerners.

More tech: We saw Mark Knopfler in concert here in Paris last month and I noticed that the flicked Bic cigarette lighter has been largely supplanted by the small glowing square -- that is, the screens of cameraphones pointed at the stage. This phenomenon has manifested itself just in the past two years; it was then that we went to our last concert, Bruce Springsteen, and there were no cameraphones in evidence. In a couple years the phones will have full quality sound and video capability and there will be a couple hundred simulcasters in the audience.

And, lastly and inevitably, a tech annoyance: Like any good ThinkPadder, I check IBM's update site regularly and download and install all the recommended driver and software updates. And once again I seem to have touched off a conflict, this time involving the vast array of wireless gimcrackery my T41 ThinkPad claims to need. The beast can latch on to and hold a wireless connection with blinding speed, but it burns up so many system resources to do it that it bogs everything down, including e-mail and web-surfing. So I've turned off the wireless, dragged an Ethernet cable out of the closet, and am now operating at flank speed once again, and growling softly.

The inside story

Yesterday I had an endoscopy, where the doctor feeds a tube about a half-inch in diameter down your throat. There's a bright light and a small camera at the end of the tube, so the doctor can look around your esophagus and stomach and anywhere else he'd care to virtually roam. Step One of the procedure is swab your mouth and throat with a local anesthetic. Getting a general anesthetic was also an option, but that seemed a little extreme for a little endoscopic look-see. Also time- and money-consuming. So, a local.

Step Two is to put a small plastic apparatus in your mouth so you can't bite down; it's held in place by a big rubber band that's wrapped around the back of your head. It was at this point that I thought to ask how long this procedure was going to take, but with the plastic bridle in my mouth it was too late.

Step Three is getting the camera down in there. They made two attempts to feed the tube down my throat, and I gagged impressively both times. The doctor allowed as how this was a matter of physiology, not willpower, and I'd have to be put under. Which meant delay, and a bigger investment of time and money than I cared to make, so I asked him to try it again. This time I managed not to choke. He looked around for maybe 30 seconds, then the tube was gone, the mouthpiece removed, and I was left with a fresh appreciation for Jenna Jameson's skill set.

The bill was an American-sized 950 euros, but then, this was the American Hospital outside Paris. I'd decided to seek treatment for the hiatal hernia there so that if I said, "Everything is going dark...." someone would understand me. On Friday, Herself and I saw a surgeon there, who declined to immediately pop me open and wrench my stomach back into place. Instead, he sent me along to the endoscopy guy. Who confirmed that I have some small ulcers, and some pain in the wallet. Next step comes tomorrow, when I get the acidity level in my esophagus checked. I can't help but think I have better things to do with my time and money.

I haven't been writing, but I did bestir myself sufficiently to download two note-taking and thought-organizing programs, BrainStorm and NoteMap 2. I first read about BrainStorm in Hitchhiker, M.J. Simpson's biography of Douglas Adams, and was all hot to try it. Later, it occurred to me that the fact that Adams used the software might not be much of an endorsement -- he seems never to have gotten his shit together as a writer, although what he did write, on those rare occasions when he could, was often wonderful. NoteMap's target audience seems to be lawyers and other besuited types, and its web site is much more corporate-looking than BrainStorm's. And though I've just started to explore both programs, their approaches seem to reflect an artistic vs. corporate approach. BrainStorm seems looser, like a comfortable flannel shirt. NoteMap seems a bit more hierarchical and better organized. It remains to be seen whether one is better than the other for taming the megabytes of notes, lines, scenes, excerpts and other junk that accretes around one of my story ideas. Also, whether either program is better than, say, a stack of 3x5 cards.

Tomorrow's news today

Having temporarily exhausted medical chores to deal with, I turned to the towering pile of writing projects on my desk and knocked off the easiest one. On my lame, creaky web site I've posted a little project that was commissioned but never published, and a short intro explaining how it came to almost be. Take a look here.

Warranty expired

I'm hale and hearty now, but was sick more or less continuously from early February to early April with a variety of ailments, including the aforementioned infection, followed up by a bad cold, the flu, another cold, sinusitis and bronchitis. The good news is I ran up just under 1,000 euros in medical expenses. That's good news because in the States it would easily have been four or five times higher. Doctor visits, of which I indulged in many, are 30 euros here, or about 39 Bush-era dollars. Prescription medicines cost 5 or 10 euros, instead of 50 or a 100 dollars. And I'm not even covered by the French national health care system yet, so I'm paying full boat instead of a token co-payment. (Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who has been pantsing the administration for years, is currently writing about how much the U.S. pays for health care, and how little we [or, I guess, you] have to show for it.)

I am covered by a CIGNA health plan the New York Times Co. has for its overseas employees, and I'm eager to see how well its employees can parse French-language receipts and what the reimbursement will be.

Amidst the microbial onslaught, I missed two weeks of work, had to cancel a one-week vacation in San Francisco, and was forced to pass up an REM concert.

The only pending health challenge is that I have to get a hiatal hernia repaired sometime soon. My stomach has decided to migrate north of the diaphragm, and one-third of it has made the journey. Unfortunately, hiatal hernias are so common that I get no street cred for having one, and the surgery will certainly be laproscopic, so I won't even get a good scar out of it. Oh, I also have to lose mumblety-mumble pounds, I'm told. But, we knew that.

Blizzard!

I've been here two and a half years and this is the first snowfall that's stuck around more than an hour.  

"A pool of mermaids"

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.

"I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he told Playboy. "So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody."

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it "a breakthrough in journalism," an experience he likened to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids."

-- New York Times obituary on Hunter S. Thompson (1939-2005)

The Spleen Cafe

Florence, December 2004 

Dawn Patrol

I'm heading back to work this morning, three kilos lighter, after four days off. I've felt better ... though not usually at 6 a.m.

Observation: From the tenor of the birthday and post-birthday e-mails I've received, my closest friends and relatives do not read this blog. (Total strangers do. Herself does.) So I've decided to pull a Dr. Phibes on you, salting these entries with clues. So that will teach you ... though not before a couple of you end up as poodle-chow.

Happy birthday to me

Yes, the big 4-7. To get an early start on the celebrations, I came down with an infection that necessitated a trip yesterday to the American Hospital emergency room. They fixed me up with an IV to make the excruciating pain go away, then sent me away with three medications, a note to take a week off from work, and a directive to make a follow-up appointment.

It's all my fault, of course. The day before, I was thinking how fortunate it is that I've never gotten sick or injured in Paris, where I would be hard-pressed to describe my symptoms. Fortunately, the roommate bundled me off in a cab and they speak English at the American Hospital, as you might have guessed.

The upside is I'll probably lose some weight. It's 3 p.m. and today I've had one (1) banana and about (50) milliliters of SlimFast. I'd kill for some Chicken McNuggets, but it's a hollow threat. I'm going back to bed.

Nose first

I put my nose in my writing* today for the first time in more than a month. I now have seven little piles of paper, representing seven projects, neatly arranged on my desk. One of them is notes for a 300-word gadget review; another is reminders for a couple blog entries. Those are gimmees.

Then there's three short stories for which I have some notes and some text, but not a whole bunch. These are the "fresh" projects. One of them came to me when Herself and I visited Brussels last May.

Another pile, substantially taller than the others, represents a story that was "fresh" when I thought of it about five years ago. I've worked on it on and off since then, sometimes for a couple weeks straight. Sometimes I think it's 90 percent there; sometimes I think I should pitch it.

Then there's a mighty pile of paper, the rewrite-in-progress of a 25,000-word novella that was well-received at Walter Jon Williams's Rio Hondo workshop in the summer of 1999.

These last two are what I cheerfully refer to as any-idiot stories. As in "any idiot could polish these off in a couple weeks." I've got a few more of those lying around, and this idiot will be taking another crack at them in due course.

Finished Sebstian Junger's The Perfect Storm today. I bought it when it came out in '99, wondering about this guy who came out of nowhere to write a non-fiction best seller. I've got literally a hundred books on my "to read" shelf (I just counted them), and at this rate I could burn through them all by the end of the year, assuming I develop no external life and buy no more books. (The latter is unlikely.) Then I could spend another couple years reading back issues of magazines. I get pleasure from reading books, and a separate pleasure from buying them. Now I'm trying to cultivate the pleasure of walking into a bookstore and coming out empty-handed.

Before settling my nose in my writing, I played a truly epic game of Risk: 37 turns, when the normal game is 10 or 12, and I was lagging until the 32nd. I know, I know, it stirs the blood.

* "Put your nose in your writing every day" was Herself's advice. (Credit where due.) It has a simplicity that my own writing prescriptions have always lacked. I come up with things like: Write for two hours a day, every day. Or except on weekends. Or except when I'm away from home. Or do a Hemingway -- 500 words per day. Not including revisions. Or including revisions. Or with a discount for revisions. Make up missed days. Or not. Use a rolling average. Multiply by pi and always allow for windage. Like that.

She prolly thinks I been out drinkin' 'n' whorin'

This month I read Friend or Foe by Alistair Horne, Four Past Midnight by Stephen King, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Heartsnatcher by Boris Vian, Man of Bronze and The Thousand-Headed Man by Kenneth Robeson, Incubus by Ann Arensberg, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White, The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, several magazines and a pile of comic books.

I watched the DVDs of Cube, Dark City, Lewis Black Unleashed, Peter Gabriel: Play: The Videos, The Iron Giant, and 28 Days Later, and had a Ray Harryhausen film festival: H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Clash of the Titans.

Printed several copies each of three pictures on the new Olympus P-10 photo printer and sent them to a couple friends and relatives, tucked in some very tardy "Bonne Année" cards.

Played two games of Scrabble and about 50 games of Risk. (Against other humans? Are you kidding?)

Sent about 90 e-mails (hey, that's a lot), several of which were substantive.

Had one phone conversation. Stopped turning on the cellphone, although I still carry it in case I'm caught in a Métro snarl on the way to work and have to phone in.

Re-bagged about 600 comics. This entails taking older or (somewhat) more valuable comics out of cheap poly bags, which encourage decay, and putting them into expensive Mylar bags, with backing boards. This is one of the most stultifying tasks known to Man. Even if you take frequent breaks to read some of the comics.

Ate at McDonald's approximately 24 times. In Paris!

Yes, it's a full life.

Can't get enough of Papa

"There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it."
-- Ernest Hemingway, "Monologue to the Maestro," Esquire, October 1935

I'm reading "Byline: Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades." Once you start to read it, you cannot stop even though you may want to. You have to go on and on, even though you are tired, because the words keep coming and you must follow them. And when you write, you will write like this, even when you do, you will realize the old man has beaten you again.

Older than you look

I just finished reading Friend or Foe by Alistair Horne, the perfect Christmas present for an expat. It's a well-written, broad-brush history of France since Paris was a Roman outpost. Sometimes the brush is a little too broad, the pace a bit too rushed, but that's to be expected in a book that covers so much ground in just 400 pages. It's a fair tradeoff.

I thought I knew at least the broad outline of French history, but it turns out I'd failed to take note of several revolts and revolutions, and one of the wars with the Germans. Those French used to be a feisty bunch, and if they weren't after some of la gloire in foreign lands, they were squabbling amongst themselves ... mounting barricades, trashing the Palais-Royal, or parading around the streets with someone's head on a stick.

And while I knew Paris was old, I didn't really appreciate how old. One of its streets (near the Palais-Royal, in fact) is rue des Mauvais Garçons. Turns out this refers not to the 1995 movie with Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, but to a band of ruffians that were operating in the neighborhood in the 1500s. They'd still recognize a lot of the buildings.

Quote of the day

If anyone can claim they're all right, so can I.
-- "Rachel's Song," James McMurtry

progris riport

The office, where careful planning, single-minded determination and raw talent all combine ... to little result.

Et voila, a mere four months later.....