I meant to post this some time ago, but I have been distracted by, appropriately enough, money matters. Which I won't go into, because you don't care.

So I have this short story that's been languishing on my hard drive. I finished it after some time, and even had a friend who is smarter than I am edit it. I could, of course, send it off to some magazines or a literary journal. I could even send it to the journal I'm technically working for. But being keenly interested in What Technology Can Do For You, I thought I'd do something else. Plus, this is more immediate and interactive. And fun!

I've thrown the story into a pdf, added a cover, and put it on Lulu. What's Lulu? It's where you can self-publish. I've always been skeptical for various reasons, but there's no reason not to have a little fun.



"Sing heav'nly muse" is not nearly as pretentious as it sounds. This is a story about Jake, who thinks he knows more than he does; Eve, who thinks the world is slightly worse than it is; and Jane, who is pretty normal despite all her protestations.

You can get this story as a hard copy for $6. It gives me $0.94 and gives you something pretty and entertaining. I thought about setting it slightly higher, but I then discovered that Lulu adds shipping costs.

Or you can get it as a free download. And if you like it, you can still get the hard copy for $6 after that.

In any case:


EDIT: Now in Kindle format!

Your turn. Tell me, what do you think? (Of the story, of the idea of Lulu, of the weather...)

Note: Feel free to spread this around if you so desire.

In my absence from the Interwebs, many interesting things happened and were blogged about. Apparently there were some pretty sweet speeches given at the Democratic Convention, which I am not focused enough to watch. And then there's McCain's insulting pick for his running mate, a woman light on experience and heavy on taking the world back to the 1950s, except in regards to the environment which she'd like to see post-apocalyptic it seems.

You know, I didn't think McCain could do worse than Mitt Romney for VP (My fingers were crossed!) but I think he did. Though I was excited and scared for the briefest of moments the other morning. The NYT headline only said 'McCain chooses Palin for running mate,' and considering the first and only Palin to come to mind, I was worried I'd have to choose between sanity and voting for Michael Palin.

I mean, how could I not vote for Michael Palin? I love him and his squinty eyes.

Moving on, Susan Faludi wrote an interesting take on Hillary Clinton and the anniversary of women's suffrage for the NYT last week. In a brief precursor to what I'm sure will come up again here, a message to anyone who tries to tell me we are post-feminist, that feminism is dead, or that (I can't believe I've actually heard this one) we live in a matriarchy: You're wrong.

Finally, moving on to something interesting and far less likely to lead to increased blood pressure, Wired recently posted an interview with Jeff Han, founder of Perceptive Pixel. The interview is about the best thing since sliced keyboards: multitouch interfaces for computers. Multitouch is more than just a touch screen, and it's the most exciting thing happening to computers right now. But it's innovative to the point of being difficult to implement, because it requires users to throw away their ideas about user interfaces. There's no keyboard or mouse, or anything like them. It's just the screen, you, and your ten fingers.

The iPhone is using a slice of the idea, insofar as it uses pinching as a command, and I think some two finger gestures too. But it can do so much more, and I want it to. It's an intuitive interface, and watching the video, it looks like something I dreamed up once when I was fed up with the linear structure of word processors. I wanted to be able to throw pages around, move paragraphs and draw arrows, but in a larger realm than paper and pen allow. I want the multitouch interface on my wall.