Fantasist's Scroll

Today is Ernest "Papa" Hemingway's birthday.

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. Hemingway snuck off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. Just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.

After his parents got tired of him hanging around, he started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, including Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in cafés, but he wrote every day.

His first collection of short stories, <a title="View product details at Amazon" target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=fantasistnet%26link_code… Our Time</a>, came out in 1925 and the following year, his first big success, <a title="View product details at Amazon" target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=fantasistnet%26link_code… Also Rises</a>. Three years later, <a title="View product details at Amazon" target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=fantasistnet%26link_code… To Arms</a> came out. By the 1930s, he was one of the best-known writers alive. He developed cancer and, in true "Hemingway hero" fashion, killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. But, by then, he was one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

Today is the birthday of Robert Heinlein.

Mr. Heinlein was born on this day in 1907 in Butler, Missouri. He wrote numerous novels and collections of short stories. He is best known for his novel, <a target="_blank" title="View product details at Amazon" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=fantasistnet%26link_code… in a Strange Land</a>, about a boy born during the first manned mission to Mars. It's filled with values from the 60's, including free love, new religions and "different" views on marriage. It was quite ground-breaking in its day and can still be startling to our modern, but still quite Puritanical, society. Heinlein called his books "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction" because he liked to emphasized the idea that he was writing about things that could, possibly, come true. He tried to stick to only the scientific laws that we knew and their reasonable extrapolation. I think that's why his work stands the test of time.
So, go read some of his work today, in celebration of his birthday.

Okay, here's some real data for ProFantasy's Fractal Terrains.

Been looking for <a id="p685" onmousedown="selectLink(685);" href="http://www.fantasist.net/downloads/RealWorld.zip">Fractal Terrains Real World Data</a>? Well, look no further!
I got tired of everyone asking for this on the Profantasy CC2-l list and thought I'd take a minute while I'm getting my chemotherapy to import the ETOPO2 data and save it as a Fractal Terrains file. Hope it comes through for everyone okay.
Enjoy!

Happy birthday, Bond!
Well, it's more accurate to wish his creator, Ian Flemming, happy birthday.
Yes, today is <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming">Ian Flemming</a>'s birthday, according to the Wikipedia. Born in London, England in 1908, Flemming wanted to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office examination and decided to go into journalism. He worked for the Reuters News Service in London, Moscow, and Berlin, and then during World War II, he served as the assistant to the British director of naval intelligence. After the war, he bought a house in Jamaica, where he spent his time fishing and gambling and bird watching. He started to get bored, so he decided to try writing a novel about a secret agent. He named the agent James Bond after the author of a bird-watching book.
After a several books that sold less and less well, Flemming started to write with the movies in mind. He wrote more sensational books filled with a larger than "normal" helping of psychopathic killers, beautiful women and bizarre plots to conquer the world. Though his books began to sell better, it was only years later that the movie industry took an interest, thus sealing the hopes of budding novelists everywhere of selling the movie rights to their novel.

Well, happy birthday anyway.

Well, as several of you have noticed, there seem to be some on-going issues with the conlang scripts.  After getting them working again post ISP move, their usage has spiked to a level that the new ISP/WebHost can't seem to handle.  So, I'm working on it.

Unfortunately, I'm also a cancer patient who's got to go into the hospital rather frequently for chemotherapy, so I don't have a lot of time or energy to work on the problem.  I'm about a third of the way through my treatments, so you can expect me to work on this issue sometime before the end of the year, but I can't make any guarantees as to when.
Sorry.

Not sure how long these have even been broken.

Honestly, I'm a little shocked that no one told me some of my conlang scripts were broken, but they have been.  I think it happened when my web host sold their business to someone else and they changed servers, but I'm honestly not sure how long that these haven't worked.  Usually, when something goes wrong with them, people are all over it, so now I wonder how many people still use them!
Well, in any case, they're all fixed and working again, so enjoy them!

No, that title's not a mistake, it's an homage.
Today is the birthday of novelist <strong><a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov">Vladimir Nabokov</a></strong>. Though he was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on this day in 1899 Nabokov and his family had to flee Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He sailed to America with his family in 1940, arriving in New York City poor and almost completely unknown. He struggled to support his family with a series of jobs teaching at New England colleges. Then, in the summer of 1951, he and his wife drove to Colorado in their Oldsmobile station wagon and he began to work on his most infamous novel, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%3FASIN=0679723161%26tag=fantasis…;.

The novel was hugely controversial, but the controversy helped the novel become a big best-seller. Nabokov was finally able to quit teaching and move with his wife to a hotel in Switzerland.

Okay, so my idea of fun may be changing a bit.

I've noticed a theme in my cancer caregivers' rhetoric lately: clean. Get clean, stay clean, avoid things that aren't clean. Wash your hands, gargle with their special solution to keep the mouth sores away, don't eat raw foods that might have bacteria on them. This over-riding theme of cleanliness may have had some small effect on my choice of interesting links.

First, with all the house cleaning, there was <a target="_blank" href="http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001645.php">this tool to minimize</a>, if not eliminate, dust from doing wall-board work. Now, that might not seem like a big thing, but, trust me, all that dust is an irritant for months to come after the work is done! I know, having stuck my leg through a ceiling while running cable and doing the repair work myself.
Next, is a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.violight.com/index.html">link to a toothbrush sanitizer</a>, which has always been a thing for me. Well, not toothbrush sanitizing, per se, but generally good oral hygine. I'm always worried about things stuck in my teeth and bad breath and making sure my gums don't bleed. That's gotten very important to me these days! Bleeding is bad when my red and white counts are down so low!
And, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.grandinroad.com/jump.jsp?sort=-1&#038;itemType=PRODUCT&#038;… automatic soap dispenser</a> caught my eye, since I'm washing my hands so much. Before I even saw it, I was thinking about how the most likely point of contact for bacteria was at the soap dispenser. An automatic soap dispenser would cure that and this shiny, chrome one would look nice on my bathroom counter!
Finally, while not a cleanliness link, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2007/04/weblinked_pill_box_to_hit_sto… web-enabled pill box</a> struck me as just the thing for someone having to track a bunch of medications. Their service, which isn't quite available yet, helps a patient keep track of all the various medications and times and frequencies they have to take. And, at $60 a month, trust me, this would have been a Godsend this past week. I have so many pills to take that a little extra help keeping them straight would have been a big help!

So, there you are, that's what sounds "fun" to a cancer patient with a lot on his mind! Kind of boring, but at least it's something to think about over the weekend. Enjoy your Friday!  (And, yes, this was also posted on my other blog, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ryumaou.com/hoffman/netgeek/">Diary of a Network Geek</a>.)

<p class="daily">Today is the birthday of Alfred M. Butts, the man who invented the game <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble">Scrabble</a>.</p&gt;

<p class="daily">Butts was born on this day in 1899, in Poughkeepsie, New York. He trademarked the game in 1949, but his game didn't sell very well. Only a few thousand copies of the game were sold, until 1950s when the president of Macy's played the game on vacation and got hooked. He ordered more for his store, and Scrabble became a great success.
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%3FASIN=B00000IWDB%26tag=fantasis…; has been a favorite of many writers, including the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who had a special Russian version made for himself and his wife.</p>

Okay, so you might have noticed that I missed my Friday Fun Link.

There's a good reason for that.  Mainly, it's because I've got cancer and I'm in MD Anderson getting chemotherapy.  So, as lightly as I've been maintaining this site, it's going to be even more lightly maintained until I'm on the mend.  I will, however, keep my other site and blog, Diary of a Network Geek, up to date.  So, if you want to keep current with my cancer situation, that'd be the place to do it.