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Here’s a couple of turns of phrase that always bug me and I seem to
only run across online. First is “For some values of _____”. This
seems to be common in Usenet posts, exchanges like “Bob Writer is
really good” rebutted by “For some values of good”. What a load of
crap. Can there be a more annoying way of expressing the obvious
realization that many of us differ in opinions.

Another is the term “non-starter”. Maybe my aversion to this term came
from the fact that I had it used against me in many an argument over
the viability of e-books, which is the first time I can recall seeing
it in a way that jumped out at me. I remember a lot of assertions like
“If you lose a device you’ve lost your whole library and that is a
non-starter.” It’s a pretty bald and absolute term, and because of
that it is frequently wrong. This is just me, but both these terms
make my skin crawl.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

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A little good news – my friend Kelley Eskridge, a woman who
I dearly love and about whose book Solitaire I raved
about when I read it (the two facts are quite independent as there are
plenty of people I like personally but don’t care for their fiction) –
is on the final ballot for the 2002 Nebula
award
. I believe that it is a fabulous book and y’all should do
yourselves a favor and pick it up, from a bookseller near your house
if possible. She’s a bad ass and by now everyone should realize that.

Published by

dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

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I forgot to mention that I was so frustrated with my inability to find
reasonably priced paper sleeves for CDs that I ordered a big buttload
of them from Sleevetown in
Tennessee. I can’t state if they really are a town of sleeves, but I
got 600 of these for around $40 with shipping. I really didn’t need
anywhere near that many, but 100 would have been $9 with $6 in
handlind, so for slightly more than twice the money I get six times
the sleeves. If this doesn’t last me for the next decade then I’ll be
quite surprised.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

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Here’s a weblog I read every so often, Brian D. Buck’s. I work
with his brother, so it is interesting sometimes to read a story on
the blog that I’ve already heard in person. We’re all geeks, but Brian
is also a geek fighting cancer, which lends a special poignancy to it.

Published by

dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

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Music TopicBand of the Day! This one is an oldie but still a goodie, Alice Cooper! There is a
download page at his Dragontown site with
live versions of his songs. I am having a pretty lousy day, some
generated externally and some from a shaky emotional state. I found
that listening to “Hello Hooray” definitely elevated my mood. “I have
been waiting so long to sing my song, I have been waiting so long for
this thing to come, I have been thinking so long I was the only one.”
I love it, a great song of establishing that he and his audience are
co-conspirators and confidantes. I wish when I saw him in 1986 that I
wasn’t so drunk since I recall nothing of the show except that a
samurai robot fell apart at one point. Oh well, one of the more minor
losses of my misspent youth.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

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I think I’m going to enable the RSS feed for this weblog. I never much
cared about it one way or the other, and removed the link from the
template. For some reason, I just started caring. Blogmax does that for me,
so it isn’t a big deal. The question becomes “Will anyone ever use the
RSS feed?”

Published by

dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

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Two months after first writing about it, I’m now in the process of
making the CDs for the Warren Zevon and Jill Sobule bootleg show from
the CD tree. The copies I received had the three second gap between
tracks and it was really distracting to listen to, particularly since
the track breaks are not always exactly at the beginning of the
songs. So, I had to learn how to use SoundForge enough to remove the
gaps. Then, having painstakingly removed the silence and resaved all
the files to WAVs, the first copy I burned had the gaps again! That is
when I learned the magic difference between “track at once” and “disk
at once” burning. I saw those options on boxes before but never
actually knew what they meant. Now I know. The CDs I got were TAO and
the copies I’m making are DAO with no gaps.

There are still 2 openings in my tree for folks willing to burn and
distribute 6 copies of this (12 CDs, as it is a two CD set). There is
still one opening for someone without a burner as well. If you want
these, mail me. After the
copies are burned, any unclaimed ones will be offered on Usenet in alt.music.zevon.

Published by

dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.