Still not out the door on this getaway. That's part of relaxation, the not being under the gun, I suppose.

A week ago I posted about Usenet, rec.arts.sf.written in particular. This morning I went ahead and killfiled Del Cotter (to name names), the same guy who was accused George Alec Effinger of being a fake years ago. He actually has things to say that are valuable from time to time, but I just can't take him any more. I hate the self appointed gate keepers in this group and I find his efforts to be a significant reduction in signal-to-noise ratio. He bothers me more than the things he tries to keep out. In the same way that I dislike the people in convention security that do it because they obviously enjoy telling people what to do, I dislike the rasf* hairshirt purity crowd. As Robert Plant once said, lighten up baby I'm in love with you. box that the authors can check to have their nominal fees included in the pool that goes to LVA. I might up the percentages higher, but that's what I'm committing to at first. I just need to find out what parameters they put on things. If they don't want me using their name, I'll just quietly send them a check periodically. I would like to put on the webpage and perhaps in the endmatter some information about their organization and links to web pages but I'll abide by their rules.

We have new cellphones as we switch from Verizon to Voicestream. It feels kind of like the move from a frying pan to another frying pan, but We Shall See. Our Verizon plan wasn't good, having no roaming or long distance in it. The one month we really used roaming when Darlene was in San Francisco, the overages ran close to $150. We could have paid $10 a month for something we only used once and still come out ahead. The downside is you are supposed to charge the phones for 24 hours before use, but not much more than 24 hours. With the spontaneous trip upon us, we have to wait until we get back to fool with them. As a geek, it bugs me some to have new electronic toys that I have to wait to play with. Oh well. Plus, these new Nokias have much better games than the old 6100 did!