Wed, 15 Oct 2003
Coda
A few developments since Sunday.
I'll be writing one more column for Shopper; I don't like
leaving any job unfinished or on bad terms, and they need a
bit of breathing space to find a replacement. So issue 192
will be my last -- five years and one month after I started
the column. (Memo to self: must update the Linux area of my
website
with the remaining columns from 2001-2002, not to mention my
two-year run of Perl tutorials in Linux Format.)
After resigning from Shopper I ordered an Alphasmart Dana
Wireless (PDF), as they've finally started shipping
the European model. You can't run Half Life 2 on it, or play DVDs,
but any subnotebook computer that's designed to be abused by toddlers,
run for 25 hours on a single charge, is drop-tested off a building,
weighs under 1 kilogram, and has WiFi has got be to useful
for something. Purely coincidentally, the next day I
got an email from AlphaSmart's PR company offering to loan me
a review machine if I wanted to write about it in
you-know-where. Sigh. Great timing, guys.
I may have sold another couple of novels. I say "may" because
I haven't signed a contract yet. Until I get the paper, it
ain't sold: experience has taught me to be superstitious about
that kind of thing. (But I'm probably not giving much away if
I say it's the next two SF novels, via a major American
publisher, and they won't be in print before 2005.) If it
goes ahead, those will be my seventh and eighth novel sales
(and my ninth and tenth books).
Congratulations to the Chinese space program on today's
orbital achievement. As an afterthought clearly inspired by
the glorious achievements of the Shenzhou-5 project (and too
much caffeine) Hoggy brings us a frightening vision
of the future (what with those cyborg monkeys who can control
robot arms by thinking).
Finally, I will be at Novacon 33
in Birmingham (November 7th to 10th). Feel free to say "hi" if
you see me there.
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