I’ve got a new short story, about black holes, astronomy, and redemption and prepared food, in the latest (August) issue, on newstands and in mailboxes now. Well, probably before now, I just got back from vacation. It looks like so:

Check it out.

From the crits of my short story:
“It didn’t feel like one of your stories, and not because it was good.” — Mark
“I was waiting to find out if we were at a Renaissance Faire.” — Kira
“You could lose nine pages and I wouldn’t notice.”
and
“As a reader I hate it when characters are smarter than I am.” — Caren

Of course, that’s only fragmentary and quotes are funnier when they seem inadvertently negative, so that’s not how the crits went. But it’s still funny.

I love that when I try to get something 50% improbable working on the Mac, like get some crazy piece of unsupported hardware working, it’s so absolutely chilled out about it. It doesn’t flip out and blue screen or freak out and start throwing errors at me. It doesn’t work, doesn’t work, hey, it works. It’s 95% less stressful than doing equivalent tasks on the PC.

Which, not coincidentally, is now on my desk in pieces and unbootable.

Here.

HOST: Is there some cost to you, psychologically or emotionally, in using these techniques?

TONY: Yes. When I came back I was experiencing intense guilt. I’m still dealing with that, and I think that any sane person put in the situation that I was of brutalizing a helpless person, it doesn’t matter who they are, you’re going to suffer psychological consequences. A friend of mine trained with me as an interrogator and trained in Arabic with me. She was sent to Iraq and asked to use these harsh techniques in the interrogation booth in Tal Afar. She refused, twice. She was ultimately taken off of her post. She… she killed herself rather than use these techniques. We’re asking our young servicemen and women to make a choice. To torture people or destroy themselves, and I don’t think that’s how we want to treat our service people.

I always do a little eye roll when I see crazy spec ads or package designs for cool products. Yeah, it’s great, you did a funny ad for condoms. I’m sure it made your friends laugh. I’ll throw it on the pile of funny ads for condoms. What else do you have? Quirky wine labels! Outstanding.

What I’m really interested in seeing is how you do something difficult.

#3, I Hate It When by Stefanie Stalder made me happy.

To criticize, it might be a little too much of the “clean look with text” thing. But our of those four, it’s not the most eye-catching or obviously clever. But wouldn’t you hire the person trying to find more difficult challenges and solve them?

Andrew Sullivan

One way to look at how the Bush administration redefined torture out of existence, so that it could, er, torture human beings, is to compare their criteria for “enhanced interrogation” with those for rape. Raping someone need not leave any long-term physical scars; it certainly doesn’t permanently impair any bodily organ; it has no uniquely graphic dimensions …. and although it’s cruel, it’s hardly unusual….

So ask yourself: if Abu Zubaydah had been raped 83 times, would we be talking about no legal consequences for his rapist – or the people who monitored and authorized the rape?

So the moon book… I wrote a new chapter two this weekend, and it’s all about thrilling stuff like server virtualization, network design, and other deeply geeky stuff. It’s probably totally hilarious and awesome to everyone who’s worked tech support or at a deeply underfunded school or government agency, and I’m equally sure any future editor’s going to read it, frown, and cross through the whole thing with a red pen.

And then I’ll publish it as the author’s cut or or something. Go all Piers Anthony “What of Earth” style.

My Mac Mini project is complete. I am soooo loving it. I’m already barely using my dying PC after only a few days, which is surprising. So here’s the scoop.

1: bought a Mini.
2: bought an ergonomic USB keyboard + mouse, hard drive, and the wrong RAM. What I should have bought was *204* pin RAM, not 240. I can’t believe I did that. It was a great moment when I got the case open (there’s a reason Apple considers it not user-serviceable)
3: installed the better hard drive
4: ordered and waited for the right memory, installed it

I really want to put some kind of massive super-antenna on it now, but I’m going to let that go.

What I ended up with is a fantastically quick, stable-as-a-rock, silent Mac that makes writing or doing dev work a pleasant, quiet activity. I love it, and doing a lot of the work myself, it cost less than I’d figured it’d end up taking to get my PC back up. Sometimes being a geek pays off.

Writing business plans is like writing a strange, high-level spec that causes my stomach to flip over a lot with anxiety.