_www.FantasyLibrary.com [Visit Who Is Joseph Teller?] Synthesis & Synchronicity 052

Synthesis & Synchronicity #52

Insomnia decided to make a return to my schedule Wed Am, as I rose at a way too early 4 AM again for no apparent reason. This is the second time this week - the first I had attributed to the usual breaking of my body clock by being on convention-time, but I thought I had cleared that all up. On top of this my creativity is paralyzed, for no apparent reason, so I'm not even getting some decent writing time on my various projects from this. Oh well, at least I can peruse the Journals of others for a time, and get some coding done on the more boring end of updating the website.

(I slept better on Wed night/Thurs AM and hopefully will be back to normal for Friday.)

Welcome I just wanted to offer here a warm welcome to all the friends and readers who have picked up on my journal since I started placing it on Livejournal. I was a bit surprised at how fast the response has been by folks to start reading and start responding. Also some of you are far more prodigious in your own writing than I am, which can prove a bit daunting. I hope that I'm not boring folks or sound too silly or too authorative in my writing.

I also hope that my choice of layout, color scheme etc are not being too alarming to those reading this on LiveJournal. I am not an expert on the system and am still learning the details on customizing and making it work in general. I also discovered along the way of using the journal, in one of my replies on someone else's journal, that there is a limit to the number of characters one can use in a reply and had to edit some of what I had to say to make it fit. (Yes, I can be far too wordy on some subjects). I know that my journal entries to date seem to be much longer than those of many folks I've read, but that I post less often than many, so please give me feedback if I am making horrible errors of judgement or etiquette in regards to length, content or choices of subject.

Spelling, by the way, is not the highpoint of my writing, and occasional typos creep in. I use Amiasoft's SiteAid 2.30 to compose my work in HTML, and then cut and paste into Semagic to get my material up onto the LiveJournal site (with a little modification to fit the format of the journal therein). There is only a rudimentary spell checker in SiteAid, which even fails to have many common HTML codes inside of it, so I tend to ignore it. (I'm also not very used to it - Until last year I did nearly all my coding by hand in a basic ASCII editor or Windows Notepad). I tend to think of my journal as an ongoing 'rough draft'.

Arisia Handout Ok, at the convention I had a handout for the 'Great Games Under $10' panel that featured myself and Hal Haag (of BWSMOF) talking about board, card and roleplaying games. Since I'm sure there are lots of people who didn't make the panel, the 2-sided handout is available now for download as a PDF file. Enjoy!

Department of I Hate It When I'm Right Sometimes : During Arisia I got into a Green Room Discussion regarding the new NASA Mars Initiative that the President had announced. One of the things I said was my fear that this would lead to Halliburton ending up with control of NASA someday, a somewhat exaggerated statement of potential risk (It was early and I was wired on coffee and I have a tendency to exaggerate when under the effects of lots of caffeine and little sleep, sort of a Gallagher discussion attitude with verbal watermellons).

Anyway, I open up the Weekly Dig today at lunch to discover a Gallimaufry box by Paul McMorrow about a piece that slipped under everyone's radar previously that should have set off alarm bells in people's minds. In the April 24 2000 issue of Oil and Gas Journal Halliburton scientist Steve Streich speculated how Halliburton would prfoit from a mars exploration by providing drilling technology. When Bush took office, Nasa and Halliburton began collaborating on Mars drilling techniques. Thus, speculates Paul McMorrow in a way that is far too easy to perceive as probably, we can look for Halliburton to receive another juicy no-bid contract to drill on Mars (for oil or whatever) in the near future.

And of course, with the failure of the Spirit rover today to communicate properly, showing that current NASA technology is faulty or fails to have enough backups, we can perhaps see a future where it is the Halliburton Space Program funded by our tax dollars.

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