Let's see, what immortal words of wisdom can I pass along tonight to the three/four people who actually read this blog?

If I had six months to live, assuming a total lack of symptoms until the day I snuff it (you know, braincloud), I would sell everything I own and go on a trip. That's not exactly true. First, I would invite Mom and da brudders over to my place and let them bid on my stuff. Give 'em each 100,000 DaveBucks and one day to poke around. The next day, trucks arrive, one for each of them. Anything with only one bidder, that person gets it. Otherwise, high bidder takes it. They can work out other arrangements among themselves if there's any wheelin' and dealin' to be done. Everything gets loaded on trucks and hauled off.

Everything else I can't carry with me past Customs gets sold for whatever I can get. I'd try to hire a cute nurse to come along and take care of me in return for the free trip, but if that didn't work out, no big loss. I'd ride a train across these here United States, hitting as many states as feasible even if that means a side trip or two along the way. Try to find that tree you used to be able to drive through. See the Grand Canyon. Next, I'd head to Australia by ship. Get as close to Ayer's Rock as allowed and stare at the Southern Cross all night until the dingoes attack. Stand inside the Sydney Opera House, take a couple days to learn SCUBA and swim the Great Barrier Reef, find out what there is to do in New Zealand and go do it. See if there's a daytrip cruise to Antarctica.

Then a plane to Greece, I think. Climb the Acropolis and claim the Parthenon for Spain. Get sick on ouzo and hurl into the Aegean Sea. Go see that island that may have been Atlantis before it exploded. Then scooch over to Italy to see Rome, pass through Naples for irony's sake, and at some point find my way onto the TransEuropean Railway System. Hit as many countries as I can. End up going under the English Channel through the Chunnel, and after taking my best guess at the final resting place of Robin Hood, seeing Stonehenge, and stealing a stone out of Hadrian's Wall, hop over to Ireland. Fall madly in love with an Irish lass who won't give me the time of day. Tell everyone my name is Sean Thornton and see how many of them get it. Then back to Britain to see what color the cliffs of Dover are these days, and back over the Channel, by boat this time.

I'd have to get down to southern Spain to see the Straits of Gibraltar. Stop by Madrid to tell them I claimed the Acropolis for them. Then somehow make my way to Egypt. Mode of transport depends on how much time is left. Can't do the whirlwind grand tour without seeing the only remaining wonder of the ancient world. I suppose it makes more sense to stop here on the way to Greece, but I'd be a sick man, so give me a break.

Next, it's either a boat across the equatorial Atlantic or flying the polar route over Greenland. Flying, I think. I want to tour New England by car. And maybe some of Canada. I want to fly over New York City but not actually set foot in it. In movies, it always looks prettier by air. Maybe somewhere around Chesapeake Bay, catch another boat headed around South America the long way. I figure my time would come somewhen around then.

Boy, would the credit card people be pissed.

How much wool could Chuck Woolery chuck if Chuck Woolery could chuck wool?

The Heroic Man. He's human. He's brave, handsome, and suave. He's the star of a wildly popular reality-based entertainment series in which he travels around the outskirts of the galaxy, explores ancient ruins, gets into all kinds of trouble, and saves himself with his charm and finely-choreographed action sequences. He's sort of a cross between Lara Croft and Steve Irwin. He's also a fake. Advance teams go in ahead of him to scout camera locations, find and childproof anything truly life-threatening, set up traps if there aren't any, deal with the locals, and generally make him look good and produce an exciting program. This is not commonly known. He has a reputation as a hero and a leader of men. When the others discover he's with them, they will look to him for guidance. The lounge singer/sex kitten/actress will look to him for career advancement. Once the stage management of his show is revealed, there will be suspicion that he is responsible for the wreck. He will most likely die trying to demonstrate that he really can pull off heroic action as on his show.

Petey. He's another Gillig, the personal manservant of the zillionaire and his wife. He exists mainly so that when the derelict's AI reactivates, it can detect and kill him, thinking him to be an invader. This is one of the first signs of life from the ship. Willy's existence depends on convincing the AI he's not the enemy. Knowing that they need to do that depends on Petey biting it.

The saboteur. This nonhuman female is the instigator of the predicament. She was hired by one of the zillionaire's business rivals to get him out of the way and out of touch long enough for the rival to take over his company. The saboteur would gladly have killed the zillionaire, but the job specifically precluded that. The rival was not willing to use murder as a business tool, and wanted the zillionaire to suffer the loss of his riches once they were gone. She used an inside man to gain access to the cruise ship's navigational computer, so as to force a misjump. She planned to keep the ship disabled for six weeks or so, then release control so it could be "repaired." The derelict was as much as surprise to her as to everyone else. Her two goals are to keep the zillionaire alive and to keep him incommunicado until a certain date and time. This is at odds with the goals of the others, and therefore casts her as the antagonist.

The engineer. This poor sod is the saboteur's inside man. Also nonhuman, he was seduced by the saboteur the night before the cruise ship launched. She infected him with a mecha-virus, an engineered disease which would lay dormant in his system as long as it received regular electrochemical signals. When the signals stop, the virus activates and kills the host. In the meantime, it is undetectable and actively evades the immune system. His only hope for survival was to agree to take the saboteur on board and help her disable the ship. He gave her the access she needed to plant an override device, and agreed to stifle repair progress as long as she told him to. He's feeling terribly guilty about all those people dying, but remains under the saboteur's control. He'll do whatever he needs to so that the virus doesn't activate. Until she kills him.

The other one. I'm not sure why this character exists yet. I had the idea for her and decided to throw her in. Her species, instead of developing vocal cords, developed the ability to generate and detect electromagnetic fields. They speak to each other by radio. To an outside observer, this appears to be telepathy. It isn't. They can detect the electrical activity in other people's brains, but they can't read minds. That would be like trying to understand what is on a computer's monitor by listening to the CPU fan. Most people don't seem to grasp this distinction and are forever asking them, "What number am I thinking of?" This annoys them greatly. They speak via a translator, which converts speech into EM and vice versa. More a transducer, really. The saboteur may perceive her as a threat, or she may just do something stupid and die.

Plan an invasion--if computer games count, check
Write a sonnet--check
Balance accounts--check
Build a wall--check
Comfort the dying--with any luck, check
Take orders--check
Give orders--check
Cooperate--check
Act alone--check
Solve equations--check
Analyze a new problem--check
Program a computer--check
Cook a tasty meal--check

13 out of 21 ain't bad.

So, there's this thing called the Traveling Salesman problem. It has nothing to do with farmers' daughters. A salesman has a certain number of different locations he needs to pass through on his sales route. In order to make the most efficient, and therefore profitable, use of his time, he wants to find the shortest possible route among the points.

This is one of those things that people are quite good at working out and computers absolutely suck at. The complexity of the problem increases exponentially with the number of points involved. Somewhere around 23 points (Illuminati take note), even the best algorithm slows to a crawl. As I understand it, if a general solution could be found that doesn't collapse with large numbers of points, it could be very useful in lots of areas, like networking and such.

So, I gave it a shot. With only the problem statement and a shaky, self-taught grasp on C++ and attendant DirectX, I set to work. I wrote a program to scatter a set of up to 100 points on the screen, string them together so that each point is connected to two others in a huge daisy chain, and start examining the connections. I gave it two rules to work with.

First, if the points were connected directly to each other, it compared the lengths of each point's other connection to the potential length of each point's connection to the other point's other connection's other end point. Wow, that's a complex sentence. Think of four points, A, B, C, and D. They are connected with line segments AB, BC, and CD. Considering the points B and C, the program determines if the total length of AB and CD is longer than the length of AC plus BD. If so, it rearranges the connections so that the length is shortened. In this case, the points would wind up being connected AC, CB, BD. Notice that points B and C are still connected to each other, but the direction of the connection is reversed.

Second, if the two points were not directly connected, the program compared the lengths of both connections to each point to the possible connections to each of the points connected to the other point under consideration, and swapped them around if the new configuration would produce a shorter total distance. Get it? Good.

The idea was that, starting from a random configuration, the path would evolve into the ideal path for a given set of points. An ideal path, anyway. Or at least ideal enough.

The good news is, it worked. The bad news is, it only worked about as well as I had heard other efforts did. It can solve a 50 point randomly-generated path. It just takes all night. I haven't had the patience to let a 100-pointer run to completion. I'm convinced that there are other rules I could implement to speed things up, if only I could figure out what they are. I've tried swapping just one leg between a pair of non-adjacent points, but it keeps breaking the path into multiple loops. I've tried detecting where two lines cross and uncrossing them, but again I have the path fracture problem.

I suppose I could run the path to make sure it remains whole whenever I make those changes, but it seems to me that that would take longer than just letting what works now work.

One other problem is that, in order to bump the solution out of local minima, I threw in a small random element to swap two points even if the result wasn't necessarily a shorter path. Balancing that random effect so that it does what it should without stirring the pot so much nothing ever settles down has been a continuing problem.

At some point, I'm going to tidy up the program so it doesn't need to be recompiled whenever a parameter is changed, and put it up here somewhere. Even if it doesn't get the job done all that well, it's still groovy to look at. Very meditative.

About a hundred years from now, after the human race has discovered the secret of traveling through hyperspace as a means to traverse vast interstellar distances in a short time, a small war erupts between two unremarkable worlds unaffiliated with any of the major galactic powers. A colony belonging to a third, disinterested species unfortunately lies on a direct line between the combatants. The colony does not survive the conflict. When the Galactic Conference, the local interstellar alliance, refuses to exact revenge, this third species, the Gillig, seals itself off from galactic society and are unheard of for the next ten years.

Then, one day, a massive fleet of unknown origin appears and commences to commit genocide on the winners of the war, followed by the losers. It is soon determined that the Gillig are behind the devastation. Other civilizations start choosing up sides and fighting among themselves, using the fact of the GalCon’s distraction to try to get a leg up on their traditional rivals. This serves only to increase the strain on GalCon’s enforcement arm, the Galactic Navy, or GalNav.

After wasting years settling these side issues, GalNav is able to concentrate on seeking out and destroying the Gillig death fleet. The battles are many and bloody, but the GalNav always manages, just barely and at great cost, to force the Gillig to retreat. Finally, GalNav and its allies push the enemy fleet all the way back to its home solar system. They collect the bulk of their forces and hyperjump en masse into the Gillig system for the climactic final battle.

Only one ship is known to have made it out of that battle intact, a supply boat belonging to one of the allied races. It carried not only its own crew but the survivors of one of GalNav’s battlecruisers, who had abandoned ship. According to their statements, the Gillig had been waiting for the attacking fleet with a fleet of their own, so massive as to make the assault force that drove two intelligent species to extinction vanish into insignificance. They fought bravely and valiantly, but ultimately there was no chance of victory. It was only due to the quick thinking of the GalNav battlecruiser’s captain that they were able to survive and escape, by sacrificing his own ship. Every other ship in the GalNav armada was destroyed.

(I change verb tense here. Watch your step.)

People waited for the Gillig to re-emerge from their system and continue to rain death from the skies, but it never happened. Eventually, someone sent a scout ship into the Gillig home system and discovered it had been burnt to a cinder. Planets, encased in melted slag that once had been a defensive shell, were burnt black and lifeless. Misshapen blobs of refined metal floated aimlessly throughout the system. These were eventually identified as the ships of the Gillig fleet. Gas giants were aflame. Somehow, in some way no one could explain, Gillig civilization had effectively been erased, burned out of existence.

The Gillig colonies didn’t fare very well afterward. Two of them were claimed as spoils of war and made into "protectorates" of different governments, effectively slave labor planets. One, not having self-sufficient space travel capabilities, simply forgot to remind anyone they existed after the war and dropped out of memory, never to be heard from again. When conquerors arrived to lay claim to the fourth and final colony planet and decide what was to be done with it, it was discovered to be in ruins. Cities burned. Rain forests were razed. Oceans were poisoned. The Gillig explained that they were ashamed of the actions of their species, and had decided as a group to kill themselves in a communal act of contrition. After much deliberation, the Gillig colonists were evacuated from their dying planet. They became refugees, people without a home, wandering the length and breadth of the galaxy, shunned and spat upon wherever they went and doomed to eke out the most degrading and humiliating existence imaginable.

That’s how they distributed the spoilsport virus.

The plague struck about a year later. Billions upon billions died. Those who survived the initial infection found themselves surrounded by the dead. Secondary infections were, excuse the pun, epidemic. Planets began declaring themselves quarantine zones and shot down any ship trying to enter their space. It took a long time for anyone to notice the Gillig seemed to be immune. Roughly 75 percent of the population of the galaxy died before a cure could be found. Between the plague and the loss of the authority of the GalCon with the destruction of its enforcement arm, the galaxy descended into a dark age of isolationism, paranoia, and fear from which it has only recently begun to emerge.

Now, 800 years after the dark age began, our story begins.

And then there was the cannibal who had a taste for TexMex and side show barkers.

His favorite dish was chile con carny.

Not having anything of import to discuss, I have taken it upon myself to produce a list of facts about my state of being. There's a rest area halfway down, with facilities and snack machines.

I live in Huntsville, Alabama.

I was born on May 12, 1971, at 8:51 PM, in New Albany, Indiana, for you astrologers out there.

I would just as soon never acknowledge my birthday. It's too much like counting down to death. And I never get good gifts.

I am male and heterosexual. I wasn't going to mention it, but then I remembered that on the net you can't assume anything.

I am a mechanical engineer.

I chose my profession because it seemed the best route to the exciting career of mad science.

Instead, I am a civil servant and make my living naming the parts of a toilet.

I have less than total job satisfaction.

I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs. This is not a moral stance. I just don't want to screw around with my brain. If you do, knock yourself out. Respect my position as much as I respect yours. If it were a moral stance, you wouldn't push me about it.

I am, however, a caffeine fiend. Soda, not coffee.

I do enjoy the smell of coffee.

I also enjoy the smell of a just-lit cigarette. Especially if a match was used to light it. Reminds me of kid-dom.

I am and have always been unmarried.

I have no children.

I have had one long-term relationship in my life, which ended when she cheated on me, then broke up with me.

I have no tolerance for infidelity, and cannot understand why so many people refuse to control themselves.

I can walk across the top of a well-constructed chain-link fence.

I have every episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Babylon 5 on video tape. Including all the movies.

I own a travel chess set I never play with, a ceramic skull named Herman, and a framed print of Dogs Playing Poker #5. The frame cost more than the picture.

I believe the personal jet pack is physically possible, but too prone to lawsuit ever to get off the ground, so to speak.

I believe it is a statistical certainty that life exists elsewhere in the universe. This says nothing about proximity.

I took a good, hard look at magic while I was in college, from Wicca to Crowleyism, astrology to I Ching. I even attended a Halloween sabbat.

I decided magic is, at best, rationalization and wishful thinking. However, the practitioners are nice people with a delightful tendency to get naked, so I don't begrudge them the belief system of their choice.

I have yet to discover any religion/belief system that can hold up to logical scrutiny. Each one claims this fact as proof of its truth. Excuse me, Truth.

In those times when I do find the need to consider a reality greater than this one, I fall back on the God/Heaven and Devil/Hell model ingrained in me before I could think critically. Assuming that's what I'm doing now.

I only allow myself that luxury after midnight.

Every once in a while, at night, I like to go outside, preferably somewhere flat and wide open, and stare upward into the naked face of infinity, visualizing myself as a speck on a sphere floating through a vast sea of nothing, at the mercy of forces I have no chance to control or influence. For best effect, it should be cold and windy. This is not depressing.

I think it takes strength of character to be able to face the universe like that, with no support system, no comfort zone, and tell the whole of existence to go fuck itself.

I visited Arlington National Cemetery in 1998. Out of all the acres of tombstones in that place, the one that choked me up was the monument to the USS Maine. Not because of all the men who died on it, but because the ship died, and the United States felt compelled to honor it.

I believe that machines are, to greater or lesser extent, alive, and that they want to perform the tasks for which they were designed. All men believe this. It's why we call ships "she" and yell at our cars.

I suppose everyone needs to believe in something. I just think they shouldn't let it affect their reasoning.

I can shoot anything that emits bullets, with a better than average chance of hitting a man-sized target anywhere within the effective range of the weapon.

I am not the best shot in my family. I suspect I'm the worst.

I can identify most popular songs from the beginning of the rock era to 1990 within 5 seconds. Give me another five and I'll tell you who sang it and take a fair stab at the year.

I used to think I knew every TV theme song in existence, until my college roommate stumped me with "The Partridge Family." Bastard.

I once worked out every possible move in Tic-Tac-Toe. If I went first, I knew whether I would win or draw as soon as the other guy made his first move. I could not lose. This had no practical application.

I have never left the continental United States. I don't like the idea of not understanding the language. This severely limits my travel options.

I have been in these states: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, West and Classic Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, New Jersay, Delaware, Texas, Louisiana, California, Minnesota, Mississippi, Arkansas, Ohio. Louisiana was an airport plane change, so I don't think it counts. Delaware shouldn't count, just on general principles.

I like to travel. I mean the actual traverse from point A to point B. Planes, trains, automobiles, boats. I enjoy being on the move.

I have insomnia and can easily stay up until two or three in the morning. Or I may just be a night person. I know I'm not a morning person.

I can't dance. Well, I can if I know the steps. But dances with steps are not what most people think of as dancing these days. So don't even ask unless you want to do the Karamushka. Or the Time Warp.

I like to cook, but I have an unsophisticated palette. And I usually don't have that kind of time. I briefly considered chucking it all and going to chef school.

My IQ is too high to be accurately measured with conventional tests. I know I'm not supposed to brag about it, but I'm running out of things to say about myself.

I either bore easily or lock onto something and focus on it for days at a time before getting bored. This is why I have half a dozen rotating hobbies.

I don't like to interrupt. This is the underpinning of my entire personality. What right do I have to change whatever was about to happen to you if I hadn't come along? To understand me, apply this principle liberally.

I wear glasses. I don't want to wear contact lenses. I tried poking myself in the eye once. I didn't enjoy it.

I think that's all the random useless facts about myself I can manage just now.

As I type, a movie called The Last Dragon is showing on Turner South, one of the multitude of commercial cable movie channels available to me. The movie is about this black guy living in Harlem in the 80's trying to achieve physical and spiritual purity through the martial arts. Well, okay, it's about a bunch of 80's flashdancing kung fu club kid stereotypes chop-socking each other to the tune of DeBarge songs. To give you an idea, the hero is called "Bruce Leroy" and the villain, played with spittle-flinging panache by Tony Todd, is "Sho 'Nuff, the Shogun of Harlem."

There's a plot, but as in all such movies, it's just an excuse to get the fists flying fast and furious. It's a hilarious flick, even more so now due to its being so deeply and non-ironically mired in both the 80's and the kung fu movie conventions, and yet not taking itself seriously. At all.

I remember once in the late 80's, after the movie had made the transition to television, my dad wanted to see it. At the time, he had a job for which he worked odd hours and slept pretty much the rest of the time. He mentioned it to me, at least, on multiple occasions, making a point of checking the listings to see when it was starting. He then went to take a nap. I was not unaware that Dad wanted to catch the flick. However, I had also spent the last few years operating under the strict policy of, "If Dad's asleep, don't wake him up."

I was in a quandary. The movie started, and Dad was out cold. Should I follow standard operating procedure and let him get the rest he needed before going to work again, or should I wake him up to see the goofy disco karate movie? So, I did what would become a pattern for me: I pretended I forgot and hoped he wouldn't notice.

That worked about as well as it always does. Dad woke up about 45 minutes into the show, pissed off that we didn't wake him. Rightfully so. I don't know if he ever got to see the whole movie in one sitting.

It's funny, the things that make you think of stuff.

I know my book is going to involve people in spaceships flying from one solar system to another all willy nilly and higgledy piggledy. I thought it would be a good idea to nail down some specifics as to how they accomplish that feat. I have decided that the FTL of choice is hyperdrive, essentially a form of interstellar teleportation with many big words camouflaging the obvious logical flaws.

So, here I present a listing of the rules of hyperspace as I conceive them to be. If anyone sees any disbelief-destroying mistakes, point them out.

1. Hyperdrive allows travel between points in space at a monumental reduction in travel time.
   
2. To those traveling via hyperspace, the trip seems to be instantaneous.
   
3. The trip is not, in fact, instantaneous.
   
4. The ship always arrives at a time later than when it left.
   
5. How much later is unpredictable. It is not dependent on distance traveled. It could take a day to cross the galaxy, and a month to the next nearest star.
   
6. Hyperspace can be thought of as an ocean, the surface of which is our three-dimensional universe. Objects on the surface deform it, pushing it downward, in the direction of the fourth dimension, usually without penetrating it. The effect is commonly called gravity.
   
7. Hyperspace exerts a force on anything that enters it, trying to push it back out into normal space.
   
8. In order to make the transition from normal space into hyperspace, a ship’s hyperdrive generates an artificial gravity spike that overcomes the buoyancy force and drives the ship along the fourth dimension and beneath the surface of existence. The visual effect is that the ship shrinks until it disappears from view.
   
9. The deeper into hyperspace a ship can penetrate at the moment of entry, the farther it can travel before being buoyed back into normal space, and the sooner it arrives at its destination.
   
10. The expensive way to accomplish this is to expend additional energy when diving into hyperspace.
    
11. The cheap way is to begin the journey at the bottom of an existing gravity well; in other words, as close to a sun or similar object as possible.
    
12. Early hyperdrive designs required a sundive for proper operation.
    
13. If a ship traveling trough hyperspace encounters a gravity well deeper than its own current depth, it will emerge into normal space at that point. The longer the trip, the closer the ship skirts the edge of reality, and therefore the smaller a gravity well is required to cause this. Entering a solar system will usually do it.
    
14. It is impossible to navigate within hyperspace, as there is no passage of time with which to perform any actions. The destination is chosen prior to entering hyperspace.
    
15. The point at which the ship will emerge from hyperspace is determined by a combination of its position and velocity at the moment of entry, and the shape of the gravity spike, not to mention the conditions within hyperspace and any extraneous gravitational effects that might get involved. It is slightly more difficult to get right than playing pool using a football field as the table, on a moonless night, during an earthquake, while wearing boxing gloves, with no billiard balls or cue sticks.
    
16. Anyone looking outside a ship when it enters hyperspace will arrive at the destination completely, irrevocably insane. This is a known problem called jump psychosis, and measures are taken to prevent it. No known species is immune to the effect
    03:45 PM | Prose In Progress

There is no faster than light broadcast communication. I don't let ships move FTL through normal space, so I'm not letting energy do it either.

What does exist is a device called a message pod. It is a small (about the size of a German shepherd), unmanned craft complete with a gravity drive for movement through normal space, a small hyperdrive for crossing the distances between stars, and appropriate navigational systems. When you need to send a message to another solar system, you record it in the message pod, give it its destination, and launch it. It locates and flies to the lowest point in the local gravity gradient attainable within a preset period of time, then catapults itself to its destination where it delivers your message.

In the more developed areas of the galaxy, a system has been arranged to use message pods to simulate a form of broadcast communication. Fleets of pods are constantly in transit between pairs of stars. As soon as a pod arrives in system, it begins broadcasting all the messages it carries. At the same time and on a different frequency, it collects all the messages transmitted to it. Meanwhile, it makes the transit from the edge of the system where it arrived to the center of the system where the gravity well is deepest. Once it arrives there, it jumps to the system on the other end of its route and repeats the process. In theory, the pods are timed so that as soon as one leaves the system, another one arrives. In practice, the time variance of hyperspace ruins the effect. To compensate, pods are added to each route until a relatively constant coverage is achieved. Each pod stays in system for about a day at a time.

The pods talk to each other as well. Two pods in the same system trade information and deliver it back to their respective origins. In this way, a message can work its way across the web of comm routes to reach destinations far removed from a direct connection. This also provides redundancy and speeds the average time taken to deliver a particular message.

That is how the public communication system works. Messages can be sent encrypted, but they are still delivered to everyone within broadcast range of the pod. A more secure method is to hire a private message pod. With it, you have the option of telling it to seek out the target of your message and deliver it directly via a hard data line. This method is more secure, but it has its own problems. First, the pod must directly find the target of the message. It cannot rely on other pods to carry its message over a wide area. It alone must travel from system to system in search of its goal. Second, it is potentially slower, since it is working alone. Third, if something should happen to the pod, the message is lost entirely. There's no backup. Pods for hire have a policy of returning to their origin after delivery or after a set amount of time to report success or failure.

Combined, these two methods of public and private pods cover the majority of communication needs. However, starships can find themselves away from civilization where the pod net has yet to be established. For that reason, ships carry a supply of message pods with them for use when away from home. They are plentiful enough that ships aren't shy about using them for everyday communication, rather than saving them up for emergencies.

The design has been standardized over the centuries, and is compatible with just about any communications system in civilized space. They are protected from harm by treaty, under threat of the offender being excluded from the network if breached. Using them for target practice is right out. Due to their superior power to mass ratio, they are able to hypertransit faster than a manned ship attempting the same passage. They are highly maneuverable and yield right of way to any approaching object.

I've had this opening line rattling around in my head for a while. I've decided to inflict it on you.

"The alien invasion fleet arrived the day after the beginning of Armageddon, which worked out pretty well for us in the end."

I enjoy the possibilities.

Holy crap, I'm out of shape.

I've got the GPS tracking aspect of this geocaching business nailed. Traveling from infinity to under a mile I can do, no sweat. It's that last part where I'm on foot that almost killed me.

I picked the two caches closest to me according to the listings, programmed the first one into my GPS dealie, and set off in search of adventure and concealed Tupperware(tm). My reasoning was that if the first one was a bust, I'd have the second to fall back on. Or, under ideal circumstances, I'd find two caches my first day. Quite the coup.

Anyway, the first cache turns out to be at the far end of the road that runs behind my apartment complex. Convenient. I drive up and discover a park capping the road, with a little baseball field, some playground equipment, and some woods. Despite feeling slightly self-conscious walking into the woods by myself staring at a box strapped around my neck, I venture into the forest.

The thing about GPS is, it's great at determining distance and direction when the two points being compared are hundreds of feet or more apart. Try it at a scale of 75 feet or less, and you may as well guess at random. I thought I was doing well. The device claimed an error between 20 and 50 feet most of the time. However, I come up empty on the cache-discovering front. After about 20 minutes of poking around in the underbrush, I decide to try the second location instead.

So, I reprogram the destination waypoint to point to the other cache I had selected. It turns out to be a couple miles north of the first one. I can't go that direction from where I am, so I head out to a main thoroughfare and start watching the arrow to see when I should turn. I wind up in a neighborhood so ritzy I can't even afford to look at the houses. My car, rattling its valves to remind me it's way past time for its tune-up, drags itself up hill after hill.

Finally, I reach a place with a few cars parked on the side of the road and a huge oil tank on the top of the hill. I decide this must be the place and get out of the car. Behind a row of sub-mansions, someone has carved out a nature trail. I've got an hour and a half of sunlight left, and the GPS says I'm 0.15 miles from my destination. My engineer brain thinks, "That's more than an eighth of a mile. Can I walk that far?" I decide I came this far, so I might as well give it a shot.

I really should have marked the location of my car as a waypoint, but I figured I was on a well-worn trail and it would be easy enough to backtrack when the time came. So, I start heading down the trail. And I mean down. The head of the trail is at the top of the hill, with only one way to go. Before I thought about it, it wasn't bad. Going down hill is pretty easy. I ought to be able to cover the distance, no problem.

I get to a point where the Thataway arrow is telling me to leave the trail and frolic among the boulders. I didn't feel like frolicking three hundred feet over unblazed, uneven terrain with my brand new, fragile, electronic thingy swinging from my neck. So, I decide to try again another day. This is when I realize two important facts. One, I don't know if I have gone more than halfway around the trail. Two, it was uphill whichever way I went.

Better the delta-z you know, I decide. I turn back and start up the hill. Maybe half a dozen vertical traverses of well over 10 inches each later, I'm moving air like a blacksmith's bellows. Huff, puff, wheeze. My legs threaten to go all rubbery on me on multiple occasions. At one point, I met a family coming the opposite way with their dog. The dog could sense I wasn't able to run away, and growls at me, restrained from coming after me only by the calls of his owners.

Weak-kneed and sweating, I finally make it back to my car and collapse in the seat, determined to start taking the stairs at work once in a while.

Caches sought: 2
Caches found: 0
Nature trails kicking my butt: 1

And yet, oddly enough, I had a good time.

I've decided to pick up a new hobby: geocaching.

The basic idea is that one person goes out to some point on the surface of the earth and hides a box full of trinkets of varying value. He then records the location with his handheld GPS receiver and publishes the location on the web. Other folks, armed with their own GPS units, then go out and try to find the hidden box. They take an item, leave an item, and sign the guestbook. It sounds like great fun.

I first heard of this through the Knights of the Dinner Table comic book. The author has recently gotten involved and has been promoting it for the last couple of issues. It looked keen, and I got to buy an expensive electronic doodad, so I figured, what the heck?

As soon as I'm done typing, I'm going to go out and try to find my first cache. Well, I'm gonna have lunch first. Wish me luck. With the treasure hunt, that is. I think I can handle lunch without karmic intervention.

I've just put a story up in the Prose sidebar called "LIke Rabbits." I wrote it a long time ago, and despite some rather obvious flaws, I still like it. I think I got the HTML issues worked out this time, too.

It's an Adam and Eve story. I wrote it before I read in one of the trade magazines that editors don't even look at Adam and Eve stories anymore. Still, I find it amusing, and when my brother read it for the first time, he literally fell over laughing. I take that as a good sign.

So, enjoy it. If you happen to publish a magazine that would have paid money for first publication rights to this story if I hadn't displayed it here first, let me know. It should be an interesting combination of egoboost and self-flagellation.

Like many people, I fancy myself a writer. Unlike many people, I do not delude myself with the belief that I'm a good writer. I can turn a phrase here and there, and I'm usually able to string a line of words together on paper to get my meaning across. But, I'm no storyteller. I don't have the sense of flow and timing needed to slap together a ripping yarn.

I get a good idea for the beginning of a story, think of a few things I'd like to throw into the middle, and work out where I want it to end. I figure out a way to string the elements together into a logical narrative. But I'm no good at getting the characters to believe what's going on around them. I can get them to do what I want, but I have trouble getting them to want to do it.

I do believe this shortcoming on my part can be overcome. What I need to do is write a novel or three with absolutely no intention of their ever seeing the light of day. Well, of ever being published by a professional, anyway. Just like a potter can't expect his first efforts to wind up in a museum somewhere, a writer can't expect to produce a masterpiece right out of the box. He's got to make the five-pound ashtray first.

So, here's what I'm going to do. I have in mind a couple of stories I want to write. One is a sci fi space opera epic comedy, and the other is a medival fantasy epic comedy. I think in epic terms, and I can't help trying to be funny, so sue me. I'll pick which of these to work on either at random or based on comments I receive here. At irregular intervals, I will write various things regarding the chosen story--character profiles, setting and background, history, whatever, maybe even the text itself--and put them up here for your amusement and commentary. Old posts will find their way over to the Prose In Progress section of the sidebar for later referral. That is, if I and my personal HTML guru can work out how to do that.

So, determine the course of my life. Science fiction or fantasy? Starships or swords? Magic or technobabble? Future or past? Or should I scratch this contemporary paranormal itch I've been feeling all day?

I can't eat.

I spent the vast majority of last week holding a convention in my bloodstream for huge numbers of little microscopic assholes. They trashed the rooms, blew out the ventilation system, and totally screwed over the climate control. They're gone now, but the effects linger.

When I'm sick, I don't like to eat. This is largely due to my concern that anything I consume will simply wind up as ammunition in a reverse peristaltic artillery barrage. Also, I keep very little food in the house, being a just-in-time consumer, and when I'm sick I don't like to shop. I enjoy infecting strangers I meet in public, don't get me wrong, but putting on shoes and walking out the door into cold, windy weather loses its appeal quickly when I'm sickly.

So, anyway, I spent a week not eating much. Now that I'm better, I'd like to get back into my normal eating habits, but I can't seem to swing it. Usually, two ham sandwiches and a bowl of chicken noodle soup is a good meal for me. Or two hamburgers with all the fixin's, a pair of Hungry Man TV dinners, an entire pizza, stuff like that. This week, among other things, I've been unable to finish one pimento cheese sammich, and only ate four out of the 20-pack of honey barbequed chicken wings. These are tiny portions. People can't live like this. Even if they can, I don't want to.

I know what's happened. My stomach shrank while I wasn't paying attention, and now I just need to force-feed it until it grows back to a decent size. But I'm wasting a lot of food in the meantime, and when I'm in the moment, I'm finding I don't really want to stuff that last morsel down my gullet. This is unlike me.

Hmm, chicken noodle soup sounds kinda tasty right now, actually. Excuse me.

Program Note:

This is kind of interesting. Tonight, Feb 20, at 8:02, the stars will align, the gates of Heaven will open, and a new era of peace and prosperity will wash over the lands of the Earth.

Actually, what will happen is that, if you allow for the reading of the date in the European style (ddmmyy instead of mmddyy), the clock will say something clever.

The time will be 20:02 20/02, 2002.

It's a pretty rare occurrence, what with the palindromicity of it all. Next one won't be until 2112. So set your clocks and don't miss it.

I haven't been this excited since 12:34:56 7/8/90.

Over in the Essays/Rants section, you'll find a missive I wrote sometime last year called, "Women Are From the Forebrain, Men Are From the Medulla Oblongata." I think it's pretty funny and hope you enjoy it.

That essay started life as an email from me to my sister-in-law. I forget what prompted it, but I felt compelled to lay out to her what I saw as the basic difference between the genders. She told me that if I could expand the text a little bit, she could guarantee online publication. So I did, and she did. I would point you to the page where it originally appeared, but it seems no longer to exist.

At any rate, from that publication led an offer to write a weekly recap of the new Star Trek series for another web site which has defuncted itself, and eventually to this blog you now see before you. Because of its historical significance, I decided it made sense to make it the first bit of writing I put on display here.

It's not pretty. I was under the impression it would show up looking somewhat like this main page. I don't know whether I did something wrong, or my expectations were too high to begin with. I'll bet good money on option one. Expect the look to improve as my personal HTML tutor gets her hands around my neck and throttles some basic understanding into me.

I'm just happy I got it up here without breaking anything.

Who Shaved the Barber?

For years, I've read in various places the above question. I knew it had something to do with logic, but I was unclear on the details. It wasn't until today I realized I had this great big research tool sitting in front of me that I could use to learn more about it.

So, I went to my favorite search engine and typed in the question. The first listing was for a gay men's scrotum shaving page. I assumed that wasn't what I was looking for and moved down the list. Finally, I found the explanation, which I will now bore you with.

Living in one particular town is a barber. Every man in this town either shaves his own beard or has the barber shave it for him. The barber, he only shaves the beards of those who do not shave themselves. So, who shaves the barber?

This little ditty was apparently formulated by Bertrand Russell. The answer is that it is impossible for the barber to stay within the rules and still get shaved. He is a man who lives in the town. He only shaves those who don't shave themselves. Therefore, he can only shave himself if he doesn't shave himself.

There are lots of little details that are required to constrain the barber from taking a blade to himself. He must be male. He must live in the town. There must be a firm dividing line between self-shavers and barber-shavers, with no overlap. Everyone must shave. Possibly more. Forget one detail, and you leave a loophole for the barber to skin himself through. Get them all right, and you have yourself a lovely little paradox, which was the point to begin with.

I feel better for knowing this. Don't you?

I play Everquest, an online game called an MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role playing game. I started because a friend of mine was playing, and wanted someone he knew inside to hang around with.

It's a fun game, if a bit monotonous at times. The idea is that as you kill monsters, of which there are many, you gain experience and go up in levels. As your level increases, so does your ability to fight, so you can take out stronger monsters. It's a vicious cycle.

The game is pretty much designed to force you to group with other players against the monsters. In a group, you split the experience earned among all the participants, but you can usually defeat things at a rate so much higher, and of such greater difficulty, that you usually wind up advancing faster in a group than out of one. In order to prevent certain forms of cheating, only characters whose levels are close enough together may group together.

So anyway, it has worked out that I tend to have the chance to play pretty much on weekends only. My friend who got me involved, and everyone else he's met in the game, tend to play whenever they are conscious. The result of which is that they all advance much more quickly than I do. Which means, after almost two years of playing, all my characters have fallen behind to levels too low to group with any of them. Thus, I am here rather than there.

My strategy up to this point has been to wait until they get their characters up to a level that one of mine can group with, ride the wave while it lasts, then wait for them to get to the next guy.

If I had a point, I've forgotten it.

I'm blocked, okay?

I've spent the last two days sitting around trying to think of anything that people might find interesting, and individually cursing each and every cold virus that still refuses to vacate my person. These have been equally effective.

I wrote a nice little spiel yesterday about the unfairness of the Russian skaters being allowed to keep their gold medals even after the Canadians received justice, but Blogger ate it, and I was too disgusted to rewrite it.

I just watched The Big Chill on Bravo. I was a kid when that movie came out. Now, I am the people in that movie. You know, except for the money, friends, and sex.

I have a fairly low threshhold of frustration. I expect it is the result of most everything I attempted in my formative years being so damn easy. Now, as an adult, it doesn't take all that much to drive me into a screaming, heavy object throwing, somebody's gonna die rage. I suspect this has something to do with why the apartments surrounding mine never stay occupied very long. And yet, I am unfailingly polite to random people I interact with in those periods.

I am what you might call a private person. In fact, it would surprise me greatly to learn that anyone reading this was aware of the facts in the prior paragraph. They know who they are.

I didn't mean to imply that I go into a rage and kill the people living around me. If anyone in authority asks, I never said that.

Because I am a private person, I am reluctant to reveal any personal information to anyone, at any time, for any reason. I've always been this way. I keep wanting to write these essays for this blog about who I am and why I turned out like I did, as if I knew the reasons myself. But then I remember I'm not the sort of person who does self-analytical revelatory essays, and try to jump tracks to a new train of thought. But they all seem to be pulled by the locomotive of introspection.

I enjoy straining metaphors.

When I was a kid, I went to all those Future Leaders of America camps, where they teach ya...I don't know what they were trying to teach me. It was right around then that I realized (and then forgot until earlier today) that the one thing I really want out of life is as little responsibility as possible. I don't want people to depend on me. I don't want my mistakes to affect anyone but myself. This explains a lot.

There's a better than even chance I'm not going to post this.

I hope you didn't come here expecting Happy Fun Blog. If so, please fill out the attached form for a full refund.

You now know more about me than anyone I've met in the last ten years.

Somehow, I know this is going to wind up in my file at work and come back to bite me on the ass. At this precise moment, I don't care.

Which doesn't mean I won't come back and delete it later.

So, this is my weblog. What do you think so far?

I honestly don't know how things are going to proceed around here. I might share my deepest, innermost thoughts, spilling my heart across the net and gumming up everyone's modems with my hemoglobin. I might simply post fluff pieces to amuse and confuse. Potentially both.

As things get rolling around here, I expect I'll formally introduce myself, explain what all those boxes over to the side are about, and generally make this place a going concern. In the meantime, sit back, relax, enjoy the punch and cookies, and try not to rupture yourself laughing at my amateurness. Amateurity. Amatosity? Amateuration. Whatever.

Here goes nothing.

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