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Well, I’m fifty pages into my new novel, so maybe I’ll finish this one and be able to start sending out query letters later this year. I’m pretty happy with how it’s going, so far. Below is just a taste:

Peacock Valley, Pavonis Mons, Mars - 2589 A.D.

A hole in the sky.

That wasn’t what Jake Carpenter expected to encounter when he’d set out flying that day. He’d just wanted to enjoy the sensation of riding the thermals over Lake Burroughs, hitching a free ride until they broke against the top of the sky at the membrane that covered the Pavonis Mons Caldera and protected Peacock Valley from the frigid temperatures and near vacuum normally found at the summit of the third largest volcano in the solar system.

He was just reaching the top of a thermal, almost eight kilometers above the valley floor, when he noticed a strange cloud off towards the northwestern wall of the valley. The cloud was right up against the sky membrane, and it looked like it was pinned in place, roiling and squirming like a trapped thing. He’d never seen anything like it in all his years of flying.

—

Hope to post more later.

A few years ago, Stephen King said he was done writing. That was after the conclusion of the Gunslinger series, which is one of the best reads I’ve encountered. Fortunately, his muse didn’t die so easily. Since then he’s written several books, most recently Under The Dome,  a story he first started working on in 1975, according to his afterword, but backed away from because he was intimidated by it. Fortunately, he dusted off the manuscript in 2007, hired an excellent researcher, and went back to work. The result is a hefty volume 1088 pages long that I read in less time than many 150 page novels.

What happens when you take a small town in Maine and surround it by an invisible barrier that prevents anything from passing except tiny amounts of air and water? That’s where King starts. The fictional town of Chester Mills, Maine becomes a pressure cooker in which ordinary small town people are reduced to their essential natures. Some rise to the challenge to become heroes, and others, who would have been nothing more than petty scoundrels are forged into monsters. King shows how the sins of the past can define an individual for the better or the worst.

I really enjoyed this novel. I think it ranks up there with The Stand and the Gunslinger Series as one of King’s best works.

Recently, we had some problems that we originally thought were our with our TIVO. Some of our favorite programs weren’t being recorded. When we looked at what we recording, it was of some program on a different channel, or just a message from the comcast cable box saying “This Channel Will Be Available Shortly.”

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Why do we need a public option? President Obama tells us that we need the public option in order to keep the health insurance companies honest. The problem is, he doesn’t really explain how they are being dishonest now, and how the public option will prevent the current shenanigans. He also doesn’t explain why the insurance co-ops won’t do the same thing. So, I’m going to try to take a stab at it here.

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How can giving everyone insurance reduce healthcare costs? It sounds crazy, on the face of it. It doesn’t take a genius to understand, despite all the nonsense some people are pulling out of their nether regions.

When you don’t have insurance, what do you do? You don’t go to the doctor. You keep hoping you’ll get better. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you just die. But too many times, you wait too long and then you wind up going to the emergency room. By then, what you have is very serious and it costs a whole lot of money to fix it.

How do I know? Because it happened to me when I was twenty. I got sick but had no insurance. If I had gone to the doctor and been properly diagnosed, it would have costs less than ten dollars a month to treat my disease. Instead, I didn’t go in until I was nearly dead and had to be carried in by friends. I had to spend two days in intensive care and another twelve days in a ward. It cost over twenty thousand dollars, and that was almost thirty years ago. I’m sure it would have cost a lot more now.

I’ve talked to other people who have the same disease I had, which is chronic, and many of them didn’t have insurance. They also couldn’t afford the medicine. So, in one man’s case, he would be back at the hospital every couple of months. He’d use up resources and take up a be for several days before he’d be well enough to leave. He couldn’t hold down a job because of his frequent absence due to his illness. He had to get by with day labor. If he’d had insurance, his disease could have been managed as mine was after my incident in the hospital. I only went into the hospital because of that disease one more time, and that was fifteen years later, and it was to have the offending organ removed.

Treating that poor gentleman probably cost far more than my insurance premiums. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that treating him cost more in a single year than my insurance has cost myself and my employers that whole time.

I suspect that the man I’m refering to is probably dead by now, even though he was the same age as I was. Had he had insurance he could have worked a better job. He would have been a productive member of society. Instead he wound up having a miserable, and probably short, life. If I’d not been very lucky, that could have been me. It could have been you.

My father did some work for a hospital down in Florida. He was a marketing consultant. They asked him about a problem they had. They were a private hospital, but they were the only game in town, and never turned anyone away who needed care. They had just invested in a couple of birthing rooms.

Unfortunately, because of the way the county was zoned, everyone was either VERY rich, or VERY poor. The very poor women in the comunity were coming in with premature labor, underweight sick babies. The hospital often had to use the birthing rooms for these indigent patients. It was costing them a great deal of money.

My father made a simple suggestion: he told them that the best way to solve this problem was to send a van out to the poor part of the county once a week. The nurses in the van sought out pregnant women and taught them about proper diet, excercise, and the need to refrain from drug use. The nurses also handed out pregnancy vitamins and helped the women have full term pregnancies, which resulted in healthier babies.

The hospital was able to go back to charging an arm and a leg for the birthing rooms. The poor women in the community were taken care of and had healthier babies. The van and the nurses cost the hospital some money, but far less than the profits they were losing on the birthing rooms.

Good community healthcare just makes sense and it saves money.

It used to be that all you had to worry about when you purchased a power supply was if it had enough wattage to do the job. With the last couple of generations of CPUs and video cards, that’s no longer enough. Now you need to worry about how stable the power supply is, if it has modular cables, if it uses a single rail or multiple rails, and how efficient it is — oh, and price.

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It’s like that story about the guy who sleeps for a hundred years and is surprised at all that has changed around him. The Republicans have suddenly been startled awake after sleeping for eight years, during which their pride and joy, G.W. Bush, ran up the largest deficit in the history of civilization while doing his best to conceal all kinds of special deals for his buddies. He even went so far as to take the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq off the books. So, now that we have someone in office who isn’t Republican, spending is suddenly a bad thing.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of the crap. I’ll be happy to listen to honest debate about real issues, but the truth is that without a stimulus package there is no end in sight for this recession. I might be upset about how much this is going to cost, but I do recognize what the cost in human suffering would be if we sat on our hands and did nothing.

Of course, that’s not really what the Republicans want. That would be madness. It might cost some of them their cushy jobs and there might be a decline in support from their rich buddies. No, what the Republicans really want is to protect their own special interests from the axe that Obama is wielding in order to find the money to fix the problems he’s inherited without digging us so deep in the whole we’d never get out. So the Republicans will scream about spending on volcano monitoring equipment, about replacing federal vehicles that guzzle gas with hybrids and electrics, and about any other line item that they can spin into some kind of look-at-what-they’re-wasting-money-on-now!

Let’s talk about waste. How about sitting on our hands for thirty years after we were shown by the first Oil Crisis, just how vulnerable we were because of our dependence on oil? For all those years, the oil companies have drained money out of our pockets and put it into the pockets of middle-east high-rollers, some of whom like to finance terrorists. The money that paid for the attack on the U.S. on 9/11 came from the U.S., in payments for oil. Take a moment and think about what this country might look like if all that money hadn’t been carried off by the super-tanker load. We would have had money for road work, for health care, for improving the education of our children. We would all be better paid.

If we hadn’t paid for that oil. If we had refused to stay addicted and developed alternative energies, we would still have all that money, and we might not now be facing the climate change crisis that looms over us like a dark and dangerous storm that has yet to break.

Why didn’t we make changes? Because most of the politicians who’ve been in power over the last 30 years have owed allegience to Big Oil. The Bush family got their money from oil. Oil money helped finance Regean’s campaign and that of McCain. About the time it looked like Clinton might have gotten to work on the problem, Republicans suckered him into lying to Congress by questioning him about his affair with an intern. (You should keep in mind, that up until Clinton was questioned, he’d broken no law. He’d just been a cheating pig, which isn’t illegal in this country.) The Republican party managed to keep our former President busy with legal problems, so he wasn’t able to do his job.

That happens too much on both sides of the aisle, but lately, the Republicans seem to have made obstruction and obscufation a science. Even now, they are doing their best to slow the current administration. I dont’ think they have real problems with what Obama is doing. They all know that if they were in his place, they’d be forced to do the same things, but none of them have the guts to admit it. So, instead, they oppose him, for no reason other than he’s not Republican.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it often. If our politicians can’t begin to place the importance of good government before their own party affiliation, then we will fail as a nation. We will show the whole world what can happen when a democracy devolves into a mindless power struggle. The real shame of it is, we are needed. The U.S. needs to lead the way out of the Climate Change mess. If we don’t, it won’t just be our ideals that are lost, it might be our entire civilization, if not our species and most of the other species on the planet.

I used to think the Climate Change guys were exagerating, so I started reading the actual reports. I learned as much of the science as I could, and tried to determine who was giving me the straightest information. What scares me is that I don’t think the scientists have been exagerating. I think most of them are understating things. Scientists, unlike politicians, live or die based on what they say. The can’t go back and spin the scientific papers they author.

If we let things get completely out of hand and the Ice in Antarctica melts, our species may never see the Earth like it is now ever again. There is enough ice in Antarctica and Greenland to raise the seas at least thirty feet. That is high enough to flood over ninety percent of the populated world. People like to live near the ocean, and most of them do. Even though 30′ might not sound like that much, that would be enough to submerge most of Florida, all of the Florida Keys, most barrier islands, and all the pacific coral atolls. All those people would have to move inland, and they wouldn’t have any resources to bring with them. Couple that with a world population that is still growing and it’s a pretty bad picture.

So, here’s what I’d like. I would like the Republican constituents to have a chat with their representatives about honesty. I believe a healthy opposition party is a vital part of our system of government. That means we need a party that can argue based on the merit of it’s ideas, not on how much it can spin piddling nits into “issues.”

Barak Obama has already performed two invaluable services for our country. By getting elected, he’s helped us take another giant step forward, away from our racist past and into a more accepting future; and he’s set a new standard for honesty and integrity in government. Let’s see if the rest of our politicians can rise to the challenge of practicing politics like a grown up.

One nice thing about Windows is the indexing service. It can be very helpful if you have a large body of material to search through. If you use Open Office or its commercial equivalent Star Office, you’ll soon discover that indexing doesn’t work on those files. That’s because Windows does not have a component called an IFilter for those files. The IFilter tells the indexing service how to read a given file format.

The same problem exists if you run Windows Vista 64-bit and want your PDF files indexed.

Fortunately, there is a solution. The IFilter shop provides filters for Open Office/Star Office documents, PDF documents, and a host of others. You can get the Open Office IFilter at www.ifiltershop.com/sofilter.html. There are links on the same page to a number of other useful filters.

Over the past thirty years, it seems that we’ve come to expect dishonesty in our politicians, employers, and everyone who is trying to sell us something. Instead of being outraged at the blatant lies we’re told, we just accept it.

Look at the mess that kind of thinking has gotten us into. Our economy is trashed, as is our reputation around the world, several thousand of our children were sent to die in Iraq on the basis of a lie, and we are facing a world wide environmental crisis.

To those of you who have something to sell to the American people, I’d suggest trying a little honesty. It would be refreshing. Even better, it might work. You might find that people are willing to pay a little bit more for products that are peddled using accurate information instead of ludicrous stories and obvious pandering.

On the other side of this equation, I strongly suspect that people are going to become quite vengeful towards those that they feel put them in this position. They are going to wonder why the guy who sold all those sub-prime mortgages has a nice house while they are being foreclosed on. They’ll wonder why the CEOs and CFOs of all these corporations are getting paid bonuses when the end result of the work they did is the collapse of their companies and the world economy.

It used to be that honesty was taken for granted. Maybe we need to work on cleaning up our act and making it possible to live that way once more. It won’t solve all our problems, but perhaps it will make the ones that we have a little easier to face.

I’m not an economist. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever taken a single class in economics. But I think I’m reasonably intelligent and I’ve tried to pay attention to what has happened in our economy during my lifetime, so I think it might be possible that some of my ideas might work. If not, perhaps they’ll provide some amusement for those out there who actually do understand what’s going on.

I don’t understand exactly what has happened to collapse our economy, but there are some things that have been going on for a long time that I believe played a role. If they aren’t fixed, I think we’ll either fail to recover, or we’ll go on to have another enormous collapse at some future date that dwarfs this one. I’ll just list them here. See if any make sense to you.

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