The Princess Bride + Lightsabers = Awesome. Behold:
A fitting mash-up, considering Luke could have basically said the same dialogue as Inigo when he battles Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back. Of course, if Count Rugen had turned out to be Inigo’s father, that would have been a very different kind of twist.
The other day, I issued A Challenge to Con-Loving, Web-Savvy Fans for someone to create an SF con database searchable by zip code. Shortly thereafter, Nathan E. Lilly responded with Convention Finder.
Looks to be pretty cool. It’s still kind of in beta-mode; there’s only a few cons in the database so far. Spread the word and let’s see if we can’t fill that thing up. It’s really only useful if it’s got most of the conventions out there entered into it.
You know what some web-savvy fan should do? Gather up data on all of the science fiction conventions held every year (here’s a good place to start) and set up a database so that users can enter their zip code to discover which cons are closest to them. It would also be nice if you could search by date, so if you’re hankering for a con mid-April, you could, at a glance, see what’s happening.
Thanks to Tempest for pointing out this awesome listing on Amazon.com for Uranium Ore. Be sure to read the reviews before you buy, though. Also check out the JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank. I don’t think it mentions it in the specifications, but I’ll bet you could use that Uranium to power that thing.
Speaking of Facebook, I’ve started to use it a bit more. If you like, you can friend me. Or you can become a fan of Wastelands and/or become a fan of F&SF, and/or join the F&SF group.
I’ve been thinking about creating a big quiz on post-apocalyptic fiction, for fun, and to help promote Wastelands, but I’m torn on which quiz/test service to use. Anyone have any recommendations and/or opinions on which is the best? I’ve done a number of tests on OK Cupid, though that’s a dating site, so that seems like a bad choice for this endeavor. I thought about doing something on Facebook, but the only quiz generator I saw was related to Flixster (which is for movies, though it seems to let you create quizzes about other subjects).
Any Second Life aficionados out there who can help out a n00b?
I read that there’s a post-apocalyptic-themed community in Second Life called The Wastelands, and I’ve heard about authors doing in-game appearances to promote books, etc., so I thought I should look into setting up something like that for Wastelands. Problem is, I’ve never played Second Life, and I don’t really have time to figure it all out from scratch.
A little help?
You may recall me recounting my experience with Verizon’s customer support, which didn’t turn out very well. But yesterday I had a very different result when I had reason to encounter them again. This time, it involved actually going down to a Verizon store to have them look at my phone (a Verizon XV6700 Pocket PC phone) because the USB port wasn’t working, which meant that I couldn’t sync it with my PC or charge it (which was a much bigger problem). Actually, the problem was visible–I could look at the port and see that the chip inside appeared to be damaged, which was hardly surprising as I’d been having trouble syncing and charging for some time (it wouldn’t work unless you plugged it in just right, which was rather hard to do).
I thought they’d charge me an outrageous sum to fix it, or tell me I needed a new phone and I’d have to shell out for it. Luckily, it didn’t come to that, as I don’t know what I would’ve done had that been the only option, since I’m only planning to keep this phone until my contract with Verizon expires so I can get an iPhone. Turns out my phone was still under warranty; it’s been over a year since I got it, so I must have went for the extended service plan when I bought it. And happily, the warranty resulted in me getting a brand new phone. Which was nice, because trying to get the old one to sync/charge was really starting to annoy the crap out of me.
Pretty much no data was lost–only a few photos I had on the phone (which were only shots of recent Scrabble games)–and reloading everything onto the phone was a simple and relatively painless process.
In other (related) tech news, Gmail recently implemented IMAP email into their service (which is sort of like POP, but superior). Got that setup with Outlook without much trouble. (But man, what a miserable program that is. Doing something as simple as marking a lot of messages "read" seems to be too much for it to handle without crashing or locking up the entire system.)
After successfully setting it up on the PC, I tried to set it up on the phone. I’ve always just used Gmail’s mobile interface in Pocket IE to read my mail because I could never get the phone’s Pocket Outlook (or whatever it is) to work correctly for my email. Still can’t get it to work with IMAP. Or rather, it looks like it’s working fine, but almost all of the messages it downloads turn out to be blank when I open them. Strangely, not all of them. A message I received from a Yahoo Mail account was readable on the phone, but nothing else I checked was (including stuff from other Gmail accounts). If anyone can figure that out, I’d appreciate the help! Or if there’s a good Pocket PC email management app I could download, I’d go for that. Frustratingly, Gmail has a mobile app for Gmail, but it’s only good for regular cell phones with mobile web, not for more advanced phones like mine that actually use the Internet.
What’s with all these social networking sites inviting you to enter your email address (and/or your instant messenger screenname) and your email address’s password in order to grant the site access to your account? (Not using your email address as a username for the networking site, mind you, but actually granting the site access to your personal email account.) Do people actually do this? Who thought this was a good idea?