| So my parents haven’t been to Galveston in a long time. We took off and took highway-6 south and went round downtown Houston and took the hour-long trip to the island. I was hoping the trip down would have less traffic this way but south Houston has grown up and is now packed with new subdivisions and strip malls. Highway 6 is less a highway and more of a large and very busy city street.
We planned on Moody Gardens. It’s a big park (half zoo and half aquarium) on the island and is one of the big attractions. They decided to put it all inside giant pyramid-shaped buildings. The aquarium part in a conventional but pyramid-shaped building and the zoo in a large glass enclosed hot-house.
Since it was the off-season, the crowds were fairly small. The aquarium has one of those tubes you walk in and get surrounded by fish, and turtles and sharks
Interesting to see, though somewhat fish smelly. They had animals and fish from all the oceans of the world and a little fish themed cafeteria that we decided to skip. I’ve been to several aquariums and this did not seem all that special. The tropical rainforest however was great. It’s a bunch of rainforests from all over the world in a giant glass pyramid. They had gathered flowers, trees, and exotic plants from all over the tropics. My mother is a gardening fanatic and loved it all.
There were parrots, lizards, monkeys, and an ocelot. The ocelot was sullen and barely even appeared but it was a nice little zoo. All set to rainforest themes and complete with replica concrete Mayan temples.
It was a nice cool 80 degrees inside and very humid, perfect walking weather. A nicely executed tourist attraction. We then went up and down the seawall looking for a place to eat. We hoped to get into Gaido’s, Galveston’s premier seafood place however everything in and around that restaurant was packed. We ended up at Landry’s seafood on the seawall. A long-long trip but well worth it. |
The pyramids of Galveston
Does SPAM still work?
I’ve been online now for over a quarter century. I was there when the vote was taken to allow commercial traffic onto the internet. I even remember some of the early and primitive websites that first popped up and nowadays would hardly qualify as a website.
All through this time I had email accounts and for a good portion of that time I’ve had to deal with SPAM. That unwanted and now largely ignored mass communication method made possible by the ability of the internet to send “free” and “unlimited” numbers of electronic mail messages to recipients all around the world.
This form of advertising is now on the decline but still serious and pervasive enough to bother a great number of people all around the world. Most countries now have anti-spamming legislation which makes this type of communication increasingly the purview of criminals seeking to infect the computers of unwary people with malware or peddling illegal items.
I should say however that some countries do still allow spam and that some forms of emails that are annoying may be thought of as spam even though they are not technically spam. It is this category that I want to discuss.
Why do business people, rational people I’m sure, think that this shotgun approach to advertising will work? Sending out untargeted, unwanted, and somewhat random emails out into a general population that most certainly did not ask for this sort of attention is prone to incur the wrath of the recipient. So why do it?
I think it is fairly clear that the general population has gained a level of technical sophistication in the last decade. Certainly the terms: virus, spam, and scam, are not unknown to most people. I have to imagine that most people will react negatively to the arrival of such emails to their inbox. So with that thought in mind, is it really a worthwhile exercise to engage in this practice anymore?
I mean at best most people will do what I do, which is ignore these emails completely. Those people who are really annoyed may take hostile action such as tracking down those responsible and reporting those responsible to their internet providers.
Further in the last few years online advertising has embraced social media and grown in sophistication that allows advertisers to more selectively target their message to the “right” audience.
So with so much going against it and with much better ways to spend their advertising dollars, why do people still persist in this practice?
The point of it all
Whenever you do any activity for an extended period of time you will eventually get to the point that you start asking yourself some deep questions regarding that activity.
Just doing the activity used to be enough for me. I do miss those days when just doing was enough. I find myself getting wistful for the simplicity of those times. But as you age and progress you get more time to sit and consider your situation then I guess such questions are inevitable.
So, there I am sitting writing and I hit a bit of a stumbling point in my writing. The sentences all look wrong, the paragraph structure doesn’t make much sense and I’m wondering where this is all going. Not so much where this particular story is going. That I have a handle on but where am I really going with this whole writing thing.
Is anything that I write really all that worthwhile reading?
I’ve been dallying and switching back and forth between science fiction and literary fiction for the past couple of years and I’ve been thinking of combining both into the sub-genre of literary science fiction, a really rarefied form of literature that would be quite difficult to produce.
In my local writing groups I’ve seen a couple of younger writers plunging on and taking their stories to their editors and looking for publishers and generally getting on with producing their work. They’re totally committed and fearless in moving forward.
Meanwhile I’m sitting on 2 stories that I could at the very least send to an editor and get some honest feedback before moving on to the next stage. But again I have to ask myself what is the point of this whole exercise? Am I doing this just to exercise my imagination and my typing fingers or do I want to get something published?
I don’t think I want to keep all of this private and to myself. I do want to share what I am writing with a wider audience. Being in contact with actual writers, with editors, and other writing enthusiasts has broadened my horizons considerably in the last few years. Particularly in the last year that I’ve spent with members of the Houston Science Fiction writing group.
I don’t think that I will ever make a fortune writing or that I will even make a good living but I do think that I want to release some of these ideas out to a wider audience.
I am currently thinking that my focus should go back to what I know best and that my first story should be a familiar theme that I know well and that I am more confident in. A nice “easy” science fiction story that I can work with my editor on and get ready for publication.
I wish I could do something more literary as my first effort but if I’m going to take the plunge into publishing I think that I need to do something where I can build up my confidence and my experience first before tackling something more substantial.
Out of ideas
Reading the Facebook feed and someone was quite excited about a remake of the movie “Poltergeist“. I mentally groaned.
I’ve been mentally groaning for the past 30 or so years since the remake craze began in earnest and started making 2nd rate remakes, or homages as some would term them, of older movies. Every year brings some updated version of a classic movie or TV show that someone thought that they could do better. One of the few things that I dislike about movies is that any producer or director with enough money or influence can come around and make a terrible version of a movie classic.
Some directors add lines, take out lines, even whole scenes. It’s rare, make that very rare, that a remake can surpass let alone equal the original in terms of quality. All these remakes offer is a chance for a studio to make more money on an old property.
Does that mean that there should never be remakes? Of course not. Some stories have to be retold from time to time. Culture and civilization change and the old stories need to be re-interpreted to suit new audiences. But remaking a movie or TV show 30 or even 50 years after the fact? No, that’s just greed and arrogance talking.
Someone argued that remakes don’t take away from the original productions. I would agree that would be true if people got to see the original first. But this rarely happens these days. Inevitably the focus is always kept on the new version and the richness and vibrancy of the original is often lost. People may end up with a bad impression of what could be a great story because they had not seen the original version.
The other thing that is harmed by remakes is originality. Producers blinded by the lure of possible easy money may eschew original scripts and ideas and choose instead the path to “easy” money.
Some of the innovative, original, and even lucrative film properties have been speculative, and risky ventures that were unproven but given the green light by studio executives.
The Jazz Singer, the first talking picture, was a huge risk. Seems silly nowadays that someone would doubt the power of talking pictures, but it’s true. Gone with the wind, burning down an entire movie set for one scene and using highly expensive color film? They must be mad! Star Wars, made by a young director using all sorts of new special effects features and delving deeply into the space opera genre. A huge risk. But all of these were not just financial but dramatic successes.
Imagine if they had instead opted for the quick dollar instead?
Instead of just focusing on the monetary aspect of film production or making a film just to make a film why not let the ideas people develop their ideas freely and take a risk on something new rather than rehashing what has already been done.
Comparisons and contrasts
So there I am sitting on a bench waiting for my turn and feeling somewhat nervous. Waiting for what? For indoor skydiving. I know I’m not jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet and that it’s totally safe but still…
As it turned out it was quite a lot of fun. It’s just one of several new things that I’ve tried in the last year and that I will try in the coming year. I am trying to stretch out to try several new things (rock climbing and free running are next on the agenda) and so far they’ve all been quite exciting and fun.
During my vacation I tried out several new things including surfing (I would need 6 months of continuous practice to become an adequate surfer), ATV driving (somewhat terrifying) zip lines (fairly fun).
The Author, hanging on for dear life.
One thing I noticed during my zip line experience was how the zip line trainers were so at home in the trees that they were nonchalant and self-confident hooking themselves up to the lines and would fling themselves out into empty space without a second thought. I suppose it’s due to the fact that they’ve done this so much that they’re accustomed to it now and they’ve lost all the reticence that first timers like me have.
I noticed the same attitude with the sky diving instructors. They all had more than 5 years experience with the wind tunnel and with actual sky diving so that they could now just meander around the wind tunnel effortlessly and launch themselves up and down with just a slight shift of their body position.
On the drive home I started thinking about them and the zip line guys. Basically they were doing the same job, providing safe thrills for tourists while doing something that they really loved.
I then started thinking about one of Leslie Farnsworth’s blogs about rat races not just here but in other countries. One group of guys working in an ultra modern indoor wind tunnel, the other group working on a tropical paradise among the trees. Who’s to say which group is luckier or has the better job.
The main thing though is that both groups get to do something fun, they get to meet a lot of interesting people while doing it, and of course they’re able to make a living doing it.
I think that’s the key thing that most people are looking for in a job or a career. No matter where you live or what you do for a living you want to be able to do something that you will enjoy.
When you find that career or job that you like then the location really doesn’t matter as much. The working experience more than makes up for any differences in salary or where the job is located. Your working day becomes something to look forward to rather than a chore.
Sometimes when I’m working away and it’s a particularly rough week I have to step back and think about the times when work is a joy and when things were going well and remind myself why I got into this line of work in the first place.
True friends
[One cold and frosty morning in early Spring a young birdie lay on the ground shivering and nearly frozen. A cow saw him there and decided to help the poor birdie out, and promptly covered him with a huge ‘cow pie’.
The cow pie, while warm, was also very smelly and soon the birdie was yelling at the cow for doing that to him. The warmer he got the louder he yelled.
About this time a coyote,attracted by the singing, jumped out from behind a boulder and snatched the birdie from the pile and brushed off all the mess from him.
Little birdie was relieved and promptly thanked the coyote for helping him out and was promptly eaten by the coyote.
The moral of the story is that not everyone who shits on you is your enemy, not everyone that pulls you out of the shit is your friend, but most important of all, if you find yourself neck-deep in a pile of shit keep your mouth shut.]
One of my favorite Old West folk stories. It helps illustrate today’s topic. What happens when you make a bad decision and you really can’t face up to it? Who stands there and lets you go down the wrong path without stepping in and setting you straight?
A true friend, that’s who. Your acquaintances, some family members, even your regular friends may let you go down the wrong path. They may let you get away with doing the wrong thing. But the people you should be listening to will criticize as well as praise you when needed.
Let’s face it. We’re not perfect. Not one of us. It’s easy to look at a person and list his or her faults. But getting a person to face those faults and acknowledge them? Now that’s tough.
The best friends you can have are those that will take the time to point that out to you. They know that their observations may not be well received or appreciated but their concern will override this concern for their social well-being and they will put their friendship on the line to care about you and tell you the truth.
Now, you may not always understand where they’re coming from and you may not even appreciate it in the moment. No one likes to be criticized. It’s human nature after all. But once the anger or humiliation subsides, once you realize why they said what they said, go back and thank them. It’s never too late.
True friends will always stick with you no matter how bad you smell.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Book review
[Author’s note: When I first discovered “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” or “The Guide”, I found a science fiction novel that did not follow a rigid format or that was totally serious or had a sombre tone as so many science fiction novels had in the past. The novel reads like what it is supposed to be, a comedy of errors. The characters are not heroic, larger than life paragons of virtue but comical everyman characters that the readers can relate to. From that point on I realized that science fiction did not have to follow some rigid formula or be stiff and formulaic. Science Fiction could be fun. As always spoilers from here after so stop reading now if you don’t want to know.]
I’ve always enjoyed a good farce. Something about seeing characters stuck in a ridiculous situation makes me realize that even the most capable and prepared of individuals can have a bad day and are then obliged to make the best of a bad situation.
Travel can make even the most prepared of us look foolish. One little thing goes wrong and your well thought out travel plans can go out the door. I know that I’ve had that happen to me on several occasions.
Hitchhikers have to learn how to deal with this on a continual basis. Douglas Adams was inspired by his own hitchhiking adventures in the early 1970s and drawing from his association with the Cambridge University acting group, The Footlights, he began writing this satirical story of a human forced to hitchhike around the galaxy with his alien best friend and getting into all sorts of misadventures.
The story itself went through several incarnations including being first performed as a radio novel on BBC radio. Later it would go on to become a made for TV series, a computer game, and finally a movie. The original story was expanded out into five novels. Adams was rumored to be working on a sixth sequel before his untimely death in 2001 and that novel was picked up and written by another writer.
The plot of the original story is that the main character, Arthur Dent, is being evicted from his home as it is about to be demolished to make way for a highway bypass. At the same time no one on Earth is aware that the same fate will be meted out to them as a fleet of alien ships prepares to blow up the planet for a similar purpose.
Arthur however escapes this doom. His friend, Ford Prefect, turns out to be an alien and a professional hitchhiker. The two of them stow away on the alien ship but are discovered. As they are jettisoned into open space they are unexpectedly rescued by Ford’s distant cousin, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the fugitive president of the galaxy, aboard the ship he stole, The Heart of Gold.
Also aboard is a former girlfriend of Arthur, Trillian, and a manically depressed robot called Marvin.
Ford himself is a freelance writer for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Something of a cross between wikipedia, a travel guide, and road map. The Guide itself is something like a modern-day tablet that is updated by some sort of intergalactic wi-fi system. Ford came to Earth to do some research for the Guide but got stuck on the planet for several years.
Interspersed throughout the novel, Adams includes several sections from the Guide on a variety of topics ranging from the creation of the universe (many people were upset about it) to advice about appreciating Vogon poetry (don’t).
Arthur and Ford learn that Zaphod is part of a cabal trying to stop a group of interdimensional aliens from learning the “ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything else”. As it turns out the Earth was really a giant computer trying to learn the ultimate question for the ultimate answer which turns out to be “42”. The Earth was 5 minutes from its final computation when it was blown up.
The group travels to the planet Magrathea where the Earth was custom-built in order to contact the aliens that commissioned the planet in the first place. The aliens realize that the question may lie within Arthur’s brain and offer to buy his brain and when Arthur rejects the offer they try to take it by force.
A brief battle ensues before the group escapes and they decide to go to the Restaurant at the end of the Universe, which leads to the next novel.
By the 1970s the sci-fi genre had matured and had begun to branch out in a variety of sub-genres. Although some comedic science fiction books had been printed before, The Guide was really the book responsible for spawning a whole new genre of novels and short stories that focused on the lighter elements of science fiction.
Book series like the Discworld series or MYTH Adventures novels can both trace their roots to this book.
The main takeaway I got from this book was that even though space technology can seem daunting, alien, and even frightening at first that basically it’s still the same situation that we live in day-to-day. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats no matter where you go, everyone needs money no matter who you are, and you need to figure out a way to live no matter where you are. The setting may have changed but everyone face the same challenges whether they be suburban Londonites or strange green aliens. The humor element in the story brings this out brilliantly and makes these strange folk almost relatable in their foibles and faults.
If you ever find yourself looking for a lighthearted read and can get past the premise of life in outer space you will find a thoroughly enjoyable novel.
experience
You know how it is.
You get out of college and you know it all. Those geezers that hired you? They don’t know anything. They’re fossils, and ungrateful fossils at that because they pay you next to nothing and you “know” that you’re worth so much more. So you sit in front of your monitor try to do as little as possible and try to make it to Friday. Friday night when your real life begins.
Flash forward 20 years, and you have a 20 something asking you how to send a fax, or how to fill out their weekly time sheet.
“Does this look right?”
“What am I supposed to do for this?”
“When do I qualify for vacation time?”
All those inane and ridiculous questions that you’ve conveniently forgotten that you once asked when you were their age. Every day, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.
When did I become the “old man”? The one that people come to with questions, the one that people needed an opinion from, the one who is an authority on so many topics?
I suddenly look down. I’m wearing a button down shirt, pressed pants, hard sided shoes, and to top it all off I shaved. I’ve become one of “them”!
When I was starting out I did my job, I tried sneaking out early or sneaking in late. Now I have to ask them why they came in late and are they working late to make up for it, and I need them to do it cause we have a lot to do, and they need to be here.
Funny thing is that I try to look calm, thoughtful, and wise. On the inside I’m panicking, confused and dazed. I wonder if it was like that for the old men when they were my age. Has it been the same thing for every generation of office worker since this whole lifestyle began back in the 19th century? Will it continue to be this way in the future? Is that good or bad?
Time for me to go and pretend I know what I’m talking about…
How late is it?
Last week a relic from a past age made its presence felt once again. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) moved the doomsday clock forward to 3 minutes before midnight. For those too young to remember the cold war, the BAS, first introduced the Doomsday Clock in 1947 as a way to inform the public of their belief of how close to a global disaster that we were at.
My watch, set nowhere near to Doomsday.
Over the decades the Doomsday Clock has moved forward or backwards depending on the combined opinions of the BAS governing board primarily with regards to the Cold war. Recently however the BAS has expanded its scope to include such things as terrorism and global warming as possible factors that may lead to a global disaster.
I have to wonder however if the Doomsday Clock is still relevant or even all that accurate. The governing board of the BAS has stated that the clock is not meant to track all the everyday ups and downs of the world situation but meant to track overall trends. Not so much a clock but maybe a barometer or perhaps even a farmer’s almanac of doom.
The Clock has two problems. Firstly, the global situation can change so quickly sometimes. Sometimes these changes are substantial and the Clock misses these. I know that they want to predict the overall threat of a global disaster occurring but minimizing or even disregarding these changes makes the clock less accurate.
Secondly the Clock has an image problem. The general public has become somewhat immune to the Clock’s dire predictions over the years and announcements from the BAS are treated as pretty blasé and unimportant.
If the BAS intends the Clock to be more impactful, then they have to announce the meetings to change the time beforehand and make the deliberations public to let the general population know what they are thinking.
Short little notes like the ones that they currently release cause a flurry of news activity for a few days or weeks but overall they do nothing to affect change.
Really if they intend the Clock to mean anything then they need to change the way that they present the information to the public.
living with your choices
32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 strokes.
1 stroke over from my last lap. Have to reach farther with each stroke on the return lap. I’m in the Memorial Athletic Club at 6 on a Saturday morning. Outside it’s freezing and I’m the only one here swimming laps. I’ve been assigned to swim laps by my trainer for the next 3 months. Something that a few years ago I would not have dreamed of doing. Not because I couldn’t because frankly I just wouldn’t.
Sometimes you just have to do things for yourself.
I’ve had friends offer to set me up with trainers and recommend clubs and regimens to get fit but none of it seemed quite right. I mean I’m sure the trainers were great and the facilities were top-notch and the exercises probably work but it never seemed to be quite right for me.
Still feel like a jerk for not taking what they offered but in the end it’s me that has to put in the effort, right? I have to be comfortable with the choices I make and then follow through with them.
Return lap, I get a nose full of chlorine water, snort it out and keep paddling.
Another good example, I got into the real estate game last year and another friend offered up some contacts in the Sugarland real estate market. Sugarland is a nice place to live, probably lots of good houses and opportunities and probably a good investment but I just don’t know the area. I don’t know how the traffic patterns run, what the school districts are like or where most people like to shop and a myriad of other things. Whats more I don’t have the time to research it all so I said thanks but no thanks and went ahead with an area I did know.
You’ve got to have confidence in your choices.
If you go in with confidence in your choice then you are much more likely to engage with that choice once you get involved and you are much more likely to make the best of it. With a choice that you don’t have confidence in you will likely be tentative, you will be slow off the mark and lose time, you won’t get the full advantage of your decision.
Walking back to the locker room. So cold.
So is it the old dictum of “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow“?
Sort of. More like a “A good choice you can work with is better than a perfect choice you can’t live with”
Or something like that.
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