What comes out is great, but we're talking about the worrkshop itself.
3,101 2015-04-30 21:23:02
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
3,102 2015-04-30 16:55:48
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
I just remembered what a physicist once told me: the difference between a physicist and a chemist is that a chemist washes his hands before he goes to the bathroom.
3,103 2015-04-30 06:34:42
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Chemistry safer? No, I don't think so.
3,104 2015-04-30 01:35:03
Re: Format (11 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
Both Google Docs and Open Office include very good word processors, but I found that they require some manual reformatting if you want to eventually move the files to MS Word, which an editor/publisher would almost certainly require. Apparently, they don't save in exactly the same format that Word uses. No surprise, really, since they're complex files. In my case, I used only a few simple styles, but still couldn't get it to come across cleanly into Word. It wasn't a huge task but then I had only completed half of my first draft.
Dirk
There are internal inconsistancies in the MS file formats. If you try to use two different sets of controls on the formatting, you can get very unexpected and unreasonable results.
This, by the way, is why many people in the Open Source community believe that Penfield Jackson was right and Kotter-Kelly was wrong. The MS file formats are not as precisely defined as a standardized programming language, and are effectively defined only by the MS proprietary programs that write and read them. (The new C++ standard will be over 1300 pages and, in spite of 100,000s of hours of work, will surely have a few hundred holes. It's hard to cover all the cases. Look up 'Koenig Name Lookup'.)
3,105 2015-04-29 21:25:45
Re: Amber Eyes will be published soon (26 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
I didn't read your story, but ... the second cover is the best image. I think it would be stronger if you cropped about half of the hood off the top and enough off the right to keep the ratio.
3,106 2015-04-29 20:17:31
Re: New Feature: X-lines (36 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
Thanks!
3,107 2015-04-29 06:07:19
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
You were the guy who sat on the dorm porch with a slingshot, lighing firecrackers off your cigar before you let them fly ....
3,108 2015-04-29 05:11:10
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
I've probably soldered 5,000 connections, and desoldered maybe 800, and I've never had to put a fire out.
Part of the credit goes to the electronics industry and the safety standards they meet with self-extinguishing and flame-retardent materials, but the point is made. Landlords should forbid deep-frying chicken, not low-energy hobby electronics.
3,109 2015-04-29 03:14:53
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Deep frying any food in a pan. You're heating a pint or more of flammable oil to within 70 or 80 degrees of its smoke point. (That's for new oil. Used oil has a lower smoke point.) Then you're putting food in that contains moisture, resulting in bubbling and spatter, and the spatter will land a few inches from an ignition source.
3,110 2015-04-28 20:42:55
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
What I'd like to argue is that nothing I have or do is as dangerous as frying chicken.
3,111 2015-04-28 13:32:12
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Fire inspectors, it seems.
3,112 2015-04-28 08:33:43
Re: New Feature: X-lines (36 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
I just looked at Rosebud Lives by Adrian Langford. I opened the first inline review (mobile interface). About the first half of the items showed up with expansions. The others I had to click on.
3,113 2015-04-28 08:24:59
Re: Site Bugs 2 (342 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
Mobile interface: I press the menu button and enter a title in the searchbox. I touch on the magnifying glass and get buttons for writer search/posting search. I click on posting an the background color of that buttons changes. I get a listing of writers, no postings.
3,114 2015-04-28 08:14:20
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
njc wrote:By the way, I did put up a rather bland 'chapter' in Book 2, called 'A Missing Copper'. I'm not sure where this will happen, or whether it will go exactly this way, but it does give some hints about character future.
Where are the non-bland and the equally-bland chapters of book 2?
What, you never saw Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House?
3,115 2015-04-27 22:44:26
Re: Names (2 replies, posted in Fantasy World Builders)
Asimov was a master of naming. The Foundation series is particularly good.
3,116 2015-04-27 20:22:20
Re: New Feature: X-lines (36 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
Nice. 'X' for eXpanded? I think I'll take off my request to others not to inline their reviews.
Have the problems with overlapping comment zones been fixed?
Now, can we have a setting to put the X-display up as a personal default?
3,117 2015-04-27 15:08:52
Re: The Winner (9 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Congratulations to Adrian. I thought he had a strong entry. He was in my top four. (So was I.)
3,118 2015-04-26 22:54:17
Re: Chapter editing and review replies (3 replies, posted in Fantasy World Builders)
Followup thought on the last review you did for me: When you find a logic bomb or plot hole, treat it like a lemon and make lemonade. Or make it an error a character must learn from.
3,119 2015-04-26 18:34:10
Re: Welcome (264 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
Hi, I'm new and it'd be nice if you give me feedback on my novel. Mercii
Pick a few writers in your genre and review their work. Some of them will reciprocate.
3,120 2015-04-25 06:00:40
Re: Interesting article on the future of publishing (17 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
One other idea that seems more workable in the short term is to create a kickstarter-like site dedicated to raising money for book writing/publishing/marketing. The best proposals would hopefully get the most funding.
Sol, start coding. :-)
Dirk
Kickstarter is already used for publishing. The Girl Genuis people (Professor and Professora Foglio of Transylvania Polygnostic U
) use it to finance their print collections. They've got a vid out on the GG site now for their next volume ("We must buy great big barrels of Perfect!").
3,121 2015-04-24 03:12:52
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
By the way, I did put up a rather bland 'chapter' in Book 2, called 'A Missing Copper'. I'm not sure where this will happen, or whether it will go exactly this way, but it does give some hints about character future.
3,122 2015-04-23 01:30:09
Re: Contest! (74 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
I've heard of something called something like MacKinson Triple Stout. The fellow who described it said it was a bit thicker than motor oil.
3,123 2015-04-21 05:07:30
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Book Gardens Florist owns their own building, and the proprietors apparently live right next door. I've been trying to get a link out of GooMaps, but neither the Android app nor the Web versions on the Android will let me copy-to-paste--if they let me see the link at all.
Anyway, take your favorite mapper, give it 868 Monmouth Road, Cream Ridge NJ, switch to arieal/satellite view, and look for the 50x100 foot building. The front 15 feet are the florist. The rest is the book room, eight aisles the length of the space, with nooks and cubbyholes. The number of shelves varies with the predominant book size, but is at least nine and goes to 13 in sections full of paperbacks. 8 aisles times 85 feet, times two, gives 1360 feet. Times ten shelves gives 13,600 linear feet of shelf. At fifteen books per foot (and the width depends heavily on the book size) ... oops, only around 200,000.
Okay, I don't have the computations I did to get 500,000. But 200,000 is still a lot.
By the way, the original model 747 had more than 1,000,000 rivets, and the design documents weighed more than the plane.
3,124 2015-04-21 02:10:30
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Another problem. I thought the lower brightness from the yellow Platinum Dragon was due (via the workings of the LED) to the higher energy of the wavelength.
Well, the flasher on the compact, first-try-at-real-life-packaging board isn't putting out pulses. It's trying to hold the LED on for the full 7+ milliseconds, which it cannot do because of the high-pass filter which ensures that the LED isn't held on for too long.
And I have no time to fix it now. I have to put together a variable-voltage power supply driven off little batteries. It can be done with one or two transistors in a voltage follower, but if you set up the resistances to prevent overload well you limit your voltage range. I have a design that switches one of the transistors to its complementary polarity and adds two transistors in a current mirror. It -should- work but it needs to be assembled and tested and the topology makes a decent layout hard.
I haven't finished going through the financial papers. I'm about two-thirds through, and I'm getting about 20% that I have to keep because it's IRA/401K. Of my own papers, I've declared so far that I'm going to keep an inch or so of the two and a half feet I've gone through. I should have taken the electrical and electronics parts to recycling today, but I got a late start.
The cavernous fire-hazard-in-the-farmland used book store that I hope will take a lot of stuff that I'm comfortable parting with is closed on Monday and Tuesday. I may need to rent a minivan. I figure I'll have at least 300lbs of stuff to take--all stuff that I don't mind giving away (except on the principle that I shouldn't have to). But I'll probably face a demand to dump another 200 volumes, including hardcovers. I've probably got another 600 lbs of stuff to carry out, and I haven't even looked at clothing I have to move to make room in my closets.
Tuesday I have to paint 15 shelves. They'll get one coat of gloss black spray, top and bottom, and the knots will stay as they are. (White pine is cheap and strong enough.) The electrical recyclables have to go to the township. The stuff the super recommended to get the soap scum off the plastic tub sort of worked. It will need at least two more passes, and I'll have to use a brush.
Read the last verses of Burns's To a Mouse.
If you're ever in south-central NJ, you should find Book Garden Florists in Cream Ridge on Rte 537. (It's southwest of Great Adventure, and in the vicinity of Fort Dix/Naval AS Lakehurst/McGuire AFB.) My rough estimate is over half a million volumes, categorized but uncatalogued, on homemade shelves in a huge space with many narrow aisles.
3,125 2015-04-20 05:29:05
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
The bedroom gets inspected, too. If I have the time (doubtful) I will put together a power supply to run it from a string of AAA batteries.
Apparently the State of NJ is at fault here too. Another techie is facing the same problem with another landlord. NJ is treating landlords the way that some towns treat people who drive through: as a revenue source. And since the inspectors have government pensions, they have a strong incentive to safeguard those accounts.
As far as I'm concerned, birthday candles are more dangerous than my little lab.