A cake recipe whose ingredients list starts with "1 package yellow cake mix, 1 package vanilla pudding mix ..." isn't what I would call a recipe.

There are places out there that specialize in "modest apparel for women." Their offerings in skirts and dresses do look more like something I'd wear (or would have worn twenty years ago, in some cases) than most of what's currently on offer in the mainstream stores, but the fact that such a thing has to exist makes me a little sad. (On the other hand, Dillards has lots of nice longer skirts, but rather out of my price range.)

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No-one mentioned that Doctor Who is on BBC America tonight? (And if these are reruns, how come I missed them first time around?)

Yes, I know there is/was/will be/wollen haven been some kind of football match some time this afternoon/evening. So?

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Nearly half an inch so far this morning. About a quart in the receptacle under the drip in my bedroom between 6 and 9am. Two dreams in which leaks were bursting out all over the ceiling and I was running around trying to catch the water.

No Shuttle launch this morning, so no SDO launch on Tuesday. Two M-class flares yesterday; it's past time we got that thing up there and working!

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Remember what I said a month ago, about the blossom?



Yes.

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Macmillan books on Amazon, that is. Which is ... interesting timing, making me wonder if was actually a week to the minute that they were gone.

In the meantime, Barnes and Noble and Macmillan made a bit of extra money out of me, and I became aware of the existence of a new author, Blake Charlton, of whom I might otherwise never have heard. I doubt it countervails the damage done by the whole mess, but it's something.

Interesting times.

ETA: No Kindle editions, though, as far as I can see with a few spot checks.

Incidentally, it boggles my mind a little that the mainstream media seem to have picked up the "Amazon capitulates" meme on Monday without ever checking Amazon's site to see what was really going on.

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I bought a bunch of Tor books today and yesterday. On barnesandnoble.com.

Some of them were books I would have bought in a few weeks anyway, from that Other Retailer. Some of them were hardcovers for which I would have rather waited for the MMPB, but there doesn't appear to be one in sight. That feels a bit like rewarding Macmillan for what from my point of view as a reader is undesirable behavior -- delaying the paperback past the year or so that I've come to expect over the last couple of decades -- but it isn't the authors' fault. And a couple of them were just because.

(EDIT: I know I'm very fortunate to be in a position to do this sort of thing now and again. For quite a while now, the main constraint on my book buying has been reading time, followed by storage space. That's not so for everybody, and it may not be so for me next year, but for now I'm making the most of it.)

The site worked pretty well, and looks clean; it hung once on my outdated Linux Firefox, but that didn't cause any real problems. Their free shipping doesn't come with a capriciously-enforced arbitrary delay; on the other hand they do charge (or at least "put a hold") up front for pre-orders. And I kind of want a Nook, now, but that doesn't make sense at this juncture.

I have no idea what the answer is to the larger questions raised by the whole ebook mess. ( Read more... )

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Apparently, as pointed out by John Scalzi, the entire Tor/Macmillan catalog has suddenly gone missing from Amazon -- it's still searchable, but not buyable except through third parties.

This had better be one of their occasional database glitches. (There don't seem to be any Tor books in my pending orders, so I can't tell what would happen in that case.)

Edit:

The NY Times Blog subscribes to the conspiracy theory, but pnh on the Scalzi article says it's news to him.

And http://twitter.com/#search?q=amazonfail is pinging along.

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Yes, it looks very slick and shiny, but I don't think I'm the target market. Did I ever mention my prejudice in favor of knowing where my files are and what they're called, and being able to get at them on a command line if I feel like it? Granted, my Palm has none of that and I love it, shabby and occasionally temperamental little piece of abandonware that it is -- but the Palm is a third of the size and weight of this thing, and I already have two netbooks, not to mention a 2006-vintage iPod Classic that spends most of its time docked these days. I was almost tempted by the e-book angle, until I realized that it's US-only, at least for now.

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This evening, while waiting for dinner to cook and after eating it, I mostly sat in my chair in the living room and read. I should do that more often; for the last several years, between the twin distractions of TV and computers, most of my dead-tree and e-book reading has happened either in bed or on public transport. But tonight there wasn't anything on TV I wanted to watch, and the Internets were mostly not entertaining me, so ...I read a good chunk of Cherryh's Regenesis. And now I'm going to take it to bed and read a bit more of it.

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Necklace 47 Labradorite, glass, moss agate, shell.

This is another of the AGU pendants, and I wore it for my presentation at the AMS. It's more blue-green in person.

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The exhibitors at the AMS are generous with trinkets -- mostly pens, shopping bags, and hand sanitizer, but also some fun stuff, like a three-inch clockwork robot.

( Video on Flickr )

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We've been having some Weather the last few days; the California storms come through here too, somewhat attenuated but bringing much-needed rain. So far, we seem to be getting a pattern of windy, mostly dry days and wet nights; Thursday night it rained nearly an inch. Yesterday I was out and about in the sunshine, but by early evening everything was gray and there was a distinct edge on the wind.

There's snow on our mountains this morning, and Mount Wilson -- now that the webcam isn't fogged-in -- looks like a Christmas card under clear blue skies. We had another quarter-inch of rain in the night, and some of it came through my bedroom ceiling, in the spot where it usually does -- where the ceiling meets the outside wall, so that it's hard to put a bucket under it. Cue hasty picking-up of the bedroom, and an imminent appeal to Management.

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Today I finally had a chance to take the Dragonfly laptop to Best Buy to see about the ethernet cable that got stuck at the end of November. The Nice Young Man (TM) took it in the back for a couple of minutes and came back with cable in one hand and laptop in the other, much to my relief; I was afraid they'd take it away for weeks and give it back with a different hard drive, or something similarly stupid. And yes, I still have a working ethernet port.

The silly cable had been in there so long that the machine looks and feels oddly incomplete without it, now.

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Firefox 3.6 and Thunderbird 3.0 are available! (And Thunderbird 3 supports AdBlock Plus.)

(Also an important off-schedule security patch for IE, which I use as little as possible.)

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At some point between the London days and now -- probably the point in 2006 at which I lost control of my suitcase and nearly took out a colleague in a Copenhagen commuter train station -- I seem to have lost confidence in my ability to safely negotiate escalators while wrangling luggage. I suspect the progressive glasses don't help with that, either. I'll go out of my way to find elevators instead, or failing that climb the stairs the hard way. Yesterday's trip via MARTA from Peachtree Street to the airport involved a lot of stairs, mostly downward, by the end of which my knee was protesting. Today the knee is right enough, but my calves are stiff and sore.

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It's been a long, long day. I bought the new novel by Elizabeth Kostova -- of "The Historian" fame -- in the Atlanta airport, and finished it just as we touched down in Tucson. It isn't remotely SFF, but I quite enjoyed it.

Sleep now.

(Okay, not quite now. I just want to note that the day also featured two M-class solar flares, the first of the new cycle; there's been a fairly steady trickle of C-class one for the last month, and it looks as though the long minimum may finally be ending.)

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Another month, another hotel room -- this one small and rather oddly-shaped, apparently because it's in a narrow round tower. No Union Square view here, just more hotel towers.

The weather is gray and chilly, but not snowy or likely to be in the next few days. We spent ten minutes waiting on a street corner for a seven-minute bus ride from the hotel to the conference center, and walked it back in thirteen minutes.

The conference center, right next door to CNN Center, has interesting architecture; the entrance is on the fourth floor, with the meeting rooms on the lower levels, accessed by escalator, and a ballroom above approached by a pink spiral staircase that makes an interesting architectural twiddle when seen from below. It almost made me wish I'd brought my camera, but the light wouldn't have been good enough.

It's odd to be at a conference with so many recognizable scientist-types none of whom I actually know by sight. This is the American Meteorological Society's annual meeting, where a colleague and I are making a brief appearance for the Space Weather symposium. Just for variety, the hotel we're in has a (new, not used) car dealers' convention going on in its own subterranean conference center. I was waiting to meet my colleague for dinner earlier, and the spacious lobby was crowded with men in natty suits. And I do mean men -- I spotted one woman in the whole gathering. Even astronomy manages a better ratio than that these days. The scientists are a much more casual bunch, not to say scruffy.

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I had half an hour or so last night to run out for a few groceries before dark. I chose Trader Joe's, which is closer, and grabbed a pack of toaster waffles that looked exactly like the rather nice ones I had last time. They turned out considerably less tasty, and when I examined the package more closely I realized why -- they're wheat free. Maybe next time I'll try double-toasting them, as my friend with celiac does with her rice bread.

Also, the only ground coffee they had was in 32-ounce drums. That should keep me going for a while; it's a perfectly acceptable blend, but it takes up a ridiculous amount of space in my tiny kitchen. And with all that space on the container, they couldn't find room for how-much-to-use instructions.

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	Necklace 45 Black/white/gray jaspers, silver plated metal, hematite.
	Necklace 46 Coral and glass spacers.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm3dm5J5r0A&feature=player_embedded

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