New Host – New Site
I opted to just use wordpress for my main site. It met all of my goals and it is far cheaper than yahoo small business site hosting. If you have a product that needs a shopping cart, then yahoo is a good way to go. For me, wordpress is a perfect fit.
Announcing my Football Fan Free Agency
I am announcing my Football Fan Free Agency. The Miami Dolphins have not assigned me as a Franchise fan, so I am available to dabble in the Free Agent Market. If you want an additional super fan for your team I am open and ready to hear why I should be watching and pulling for your favorite team. Falcons fans don’t bother. I gave up my season tickets and replaced them with a NFL Sunday Ticket subscription.
Short Story for July 4th – First Strike on Kansas
I could not resist just tossing up this very short story in a blog post. It will age out soon and just be one of those things I toss in a collection of short stories one day.
First Strike On Kansas – A Short Story
First Strike on Kansas
By
J. Lee Ragans
© 2009 J. Lee Ragans
v1.0
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
I will put money in the Helmet
If Suspended NASCAR driver Carl Long is standing helmet in hand at Atlanta Motor Speedway when they come back in the fall, I will drive out there just to help him pay this fine.
The 12 race suspension for an over sized engine being reduced to 8 races does nothing in this case to help the small time driver owner who does not even build the engines he uses. If NASCAR can prove that the oversized engine gave him a competitive advantage then I think the $200,000 fine would be fair.
However he did not make the race, his record is not impressive over his career with an average starting position of only 36.9 and a career winning total of only 1.4 million dollars since 2000. This fine is a death sentence for his race aspirations. I am no expert but it seems to me that the engine manufacturer should have been the one on the hook for all this.
All that said, NASCAR may know something here that they are not telling us, but then NASCAR has always been an overly secretive organization. Their rules are rarely obvious and always open from interpretation, so when they drop the hammer on someone we must assume that this person has done something severely wrong. This kind of corporate secrecy has served the sport well over most of its life, but with the free flow of information today it only seems suspicious.
I will admit that I don’t know Carl’s career as well as I know some of the other drivers, but something about this story seems wrong. A small team being effectively executed because of a problem that requires and engine to be torn down to detect just feels wrong. I have to ask, so what did he do to make NASCAR mad? If they are not mad at him, then they will soon be looking like Formula One with fewer and fewer cars running every race. Small teams will be tossed aside because of shrinking budgets and ridged requirements. More and more microscopic violations will be hard to avoid.
Sirius XM iPhone app a failure out of the gate.
After months of waiting the iPhone app for accessing Sirius XM has finally been released. It is however an unmitigated failure right out of the gate. Why? It requires a premium subscription to access something that you are already paying for. I have a regular online subscription for online content because I pay for my XM subscription on an annual basis. I see no need to turn over more money for something I am already paying for.
I suppose that someone at Sirius XM thinks this will make people pay extra so they can listen to that awesome Sirius XM content from their iPhones. Do they realize that people who have already paid for an iPhone most likely have an iTunes library. So there is already music I liked enough to pay for on my phone.
Now you may ask, “Lee, you have a giant iTunes library. Why do you want to listen to XM?” If you didn’t know before you now know that I have spent way too much money on CDs then way too much money on digital music. Why listen to Sirius XM? Am I a Howard Stern fan? Nope. And by the way Howard Stern channels are not available on the iPhone app for some reason. I am an Opie and Anthony fan. Why would a Computer Scientist who aspires to be a science fiction writer listen to Opie, Anthony and Little Jimmy? Who knows. Can you explain your friendship with all your friends? I find them amusing.
So bringing this rambling back around. Sirus XM has decided that someone like myself that pays annually for a product from a company that almost went bankrupt may not access the online content on their iPhone unless they pay an additional $2.99 a month.
Sorry folks, go tell the brilliant minds that came up with this way to encourage me to pay extra for this that it will just make me reconsider paying for an annual subscription when it comes up in the next few months. That is not an idle threat. I almost did not renew this year, but I was 2 days to late to cancel when I remembered that I had to make a phone call to stop from being charged. Be careful how much blood you try to wring from this stone. I have lots of options and most of them I have already paid for or they are free. Can you say Slacker Radio?
Bad Science Television – Life After People
I remember a special on how long it would take things to decay if all the people left the earth some years ago. Now that idea is a television show. There is just one small problem, it is based on a silly premise.
The entire show is based on the idea that the entire planets population of humans disappears all at once. By disappear the show assumes that we humans have not left in space ships or have died off from disease. We just disappear.
How is this a problem? Because how we leave the planet is critical to figuring out how things fall apart.
If we all die of disease then there will be stack of bodies everywhere. The wildlife will eat well for a time, and then we will really nourish plants.
If we all got on spaceships or were teleported away in some planned excursion to another reality in a planned manner then we would shut down the power plants and open the gates so the animals can fun free and fend for themselves.
The idea that we all suddenly disappear does not make this fantasy or horror, it is just a bad premise. The producers chose one easy scenario and it allows them to take 10 minutes following the Queen of England’s Dogs around presuming how they would get out of Buckingham Palace.
Why not use the possible extinction scenarios and then talk about how the planet would react. It is just bad science and ultimately a waste of time. No research endeavor is good if it starts with a failed premise.
Bad Science Fiction
After reading the most horrific science fiction story intended for young adults, which I won’t name here, I was trying to figure out what made it so bad. I wanted to blame poor writing, but that would have been wrong. The grammar was good, the syntax correct, I can’t always say that about my writing. The problem became obvious as I stepped away from the work. The author had no idea what he was writing about and did not care to learn. I have read stories and articles about deep sea fishing and trust me, I have no interest in fishing of any sort, but the look into the life of men risking their lives on the open ocean to gather food in a commercial operation was enthralling. Why? Because the author cared about the story, and they knew what they were doing.
I am by no means an expert in NASCAR and I am sure that people who work for the racing organization who read my stories could point out dozens of ways I am wrong about details, but I try to make sure that I never lose sight of what NASCAR means to the drivers, the teams and the fans. If I have taken a liberty with a detail it is to advance a story, but it is not to say that I don’t like the way they are doing it so in my fantasy world I will make it work this way. If I were going to do that I might as well just make up everything.
I hate when an author does not take the time to care about the details it shows. If I kill a character, it hurts those around them. If I introduce a technology it has an impact. Things do not happen in a vacuum. I will of course give up my high ground if someone offers a large pile of money and insists I write something a certain way, but have no fear, I would never lie about selling out. I will tell you, then I will take the money and go back to what I want to write.
New Formats for The Spotter
Thanks to the folks who noticed for formatting errors in the previous PDF version of the Spotter. While taking the time to update the PDF, I added an HTML version in a zip file for download. Going forward, I will make both versions available with all future publications on the site. Thanks for catching the format errors.
