I got my first printed copy of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. It looks great. If you want to help me out, please go on Amazon and advance-buy a copy now. The sooner they get some sales, the better off I’ll be.

WARNING. Some negatively energized individual at a place called the “Reed Business Group” (specializing in “business to business services”) wrote a horrible review of my Lifebox book for Publisher’s Weekly, and Amazon has a contractual deal with PW that they print the PW reviews first. The attack is so uninformed and inaccurate that I’m guessing there’s something about my politics that teed-off this little b-to-b drone, who takes umbrage at my having met Tim Leary. Help me out of this minicrisis by ordering the book now, lest the Pig smother my Magnum Opus in its cradle. That CA image above shows my crying towel…

There’s better comments and reviews on the Lifebox web site, which I’ve been spiffing up of late. In the process I made a nice new build of my CAPOW program with about a 100 Meg’s worth of good pattern files to load; the big *.CAS pattern files have multiple CAs in them. You can download the new build of CAPOW by using the Download Software button on the Lifebox page.

The first CA group shown today, was “The Kind Rain.CAS,” the next is “AintPaint.CAS,” and the one below is “LuckyNumber.CAS.” Each of these images goes with one of the short-short stories that separates the chapters of my Lifebox book.

One other bonus on the newly upgraded Lifebox web site: a 66,000 word PDF of my writing notes for the book!

***

My blog's not broken, I’m just distracted. I got a new IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X40, and getting that working the way I wanted took some time. It’s a nice machine. While it was on its way, I could check its progress from Shanghai to Oakland to Los Gatos. The computer stork flying here from China.

I’ve been driving around a lot, going to Fry’s for this and that. I picked up a SONY IC recorder, it records about 2 and a half hours of stereo onto a chip that I can then, after a number of intricate computer acrobatics convert into an mp3 file.

If I took pictures of my California surroundings with the energy I bring to foreign countries would it look interesting? Gosh, look at all those cars.

I saw a cute baby in Starbucks. Kicking and rocking and reaching for his hanging toys. I’m hanging out in coffee shops more, now that I have the laptop.

I was planning to record my lecture in my philosophy course at SJSU yesterday, but of course the switch was off for the first half. But I did get a file of me reading a draft of a new SF story I’m working on, “Chu and the Nants”. I had posted the 35 Meg stereo 128 kbps MP3 of me reading a new SF story and discussing it with students here for a few days, and got some feedback from my helpful readers about how the audio sounded (not great) and how I might upgrade posting an mp3 on a RSS enabled site into a true podcast. But now (Sept 23, 2005,) having mailed off the story last week, I learn the story has been accepted by Asimov's SF Magazine (hooray!), so I don't want to muddy those waters by leaving the low-fi draft-version audio up.

By the way, “Chu and the Nants” is, in a way, an Answer Song responding to a concept in Stross’s Accelerando that really bugs me, to wit, the idea that it might be “reasonable” to grind Earth up into a Dyson sphere of nanomachines capable of running us all as agents in a virtual Earth that’s “just as nice.”

I was back in Big Basin Park the last couple of days. I parked at the park headquarters, backpacked in to (near) Sunset trail camp where I spent a night, and backpacked out to Waddell Beach the next day, where my better half picked me up.

I say “near” because I couldn’t find the freaking Sunset trail camp (expected it too soon), and slept on a random outcropping near the trail. I learned that I’d brought the fly of my tent instead of the tent itself, so had to do a lean-to kind of thing. The Compleat Senile Camper.

I started out at the same little waterfall at Timms Creek where I was on June 15, 2005. I mistakenly called it Timkins Creek in the earlier entry.

By the way, one of my regular blog-readers, Mac Tonnies, asks what kind of camera I use. I have a 5 Meg SONY DSC-T1; It’s very small and fits in my pants pocket, which means that I can take a lot of pictures. I walk around blogging my life.

Of course there’s a newer model now, the DSC-T7, it’s even lighter, my wife just got one.

The camera has a Zeiss lens, which seems to take very nice pictures. I sometimes Photoshop them, doing a minimal CTRL+SHIFT+L for “Adjust All Levels” — although I don’t always accept that change, as it can wipe out subtle color tones as it would have in this lightly PhotoShopped picture of eucalyptus bark taken back in Los Gatos. I did end up adjusting brightness and contrast a bit on this one. Really, it would look better as a print.

A dendrogyph or tree-tiki on Sunset trail in Big Basin Park. Features burnt in by firebrands. Spooky in the lonely dusk. Slight fuzziness due to motion blur, even though I shot this six times.

The biggest problem with a tiny camera is blur due to hand tremor in low light. I wish the CCD was a bit more sensitive, as sometimes it indicates low light when I'd like to be able to shoot without flash. You can use the built-in Menu to set the “Film Speed” to 400 to get a bit more speed, but often that's not enough. I’m playing with the EV numbers now to see if I can gain anything that way, seems like a negative EV might use a shorter exposure.

I shoot in lower light without flash anyway many times, as flash tends to flatten out surfaces, and only works up to a few feet. I always laugh when I see people taking flash pictures of things like performers a hundred feet away, or mountains, or even fireworks.

The downside of shooting at low speeds with an ultralight camera is that the camera wiggles very easily — unlike a kilogram-mass “good” camera. IMHO, now that we have tiny CCDs functioning as miniature film, stabilizing mass is the sole advantage of big cameras — people are only still getting big clunkers out of inertia and fashion and a sense that it makes them look professional.

You could glue a brick to the SONY and have a more wiggle-resistant camera. I've seen tiny flexible tripods. Even better would be a a gecko-foot pad. But, lacking that, I squeeze imperceptibly between breaths, or use self-timer release so that I don’t even have to squeeze, or hold the camera pressed against a tree or rock or railing.

In this picture I held the camera against a rock. It shows a rock-filled creekbed in Waddell Creek near the sea, reminding me of the creeks in my boyhood home of Louisville, Kentucky — so many of the Kentucky streams are wide and flat and tiled with flagstones. In my memories it’s often autumn there.

Getting a self-timer picture of myself is always tricky.

There I am.

After sleeping at (near) Sunset trail camp I walked down to Berry Creek Falls, which was looking good. I had the place all to myself. That’s a real win with being retired, you can go places on off days.

I walked all the way to Waddell creek, leaves falling. I felt autumnal.

Hard to believe I’ll be sixty next March. I’m a persistent (so far) pattern, a standing wave.

There were some nice little butterflies. This picture uses a digital zoom, which breaks the highlights into pixelization.

I got a nice series of pictures of flow that first day at the little falls on Timms Creek.

Focusing on this one gnarly, ever-shifting pattern of flow. I used flash on the two close ones.

The real reason my pictures sometimes look good isn’t so much a matter of what kind of camera I have.

It’s because I’ve been continually taking pictures for nearly fifty years.

Photography’s been my hobby forever, something I do to express myself, and without worrying about making money off it.

It’s nice to have a blog to show them on. And then when I walk around taking pictures of things, I feel like I'm not alone.

August 19 -24. Geneva, NYC.

Back in Geneva, Switzerland. This place is so dang tidy.

I took some nice little walks while my wife tied up loose ends with her family.

The path went near some geese. As I approached them, they all began to honk. Geese are great guardians.

I saw some cows, which is always nice. Each of them wore a bell tuned to a different note. Wonderful aleatory music. “Aleatory” means “random.” Click this link for a four meg MPG movie of the cows. As usual, it's only jerky the first time you play it.

I sat in a comfortable leather chair in the OMPI/WIPO lobby, this means “World Intellectual Property Organization,” it’s a branch of the UN, led for many years by my father-in-law Arpad. This building was Arpad’s castle — he picked out nearly everything in this luxurious lobby, above all the rich marble floors. He assembled marbles of a dozen or so nations: gray, red, pink, beige, blue, green.

The marbles are inlaid in a spiral pattern leading to a trickling Euromoderne wall-fountain. The Hungarian marble has pride of place. Arpad was always happy and energetic in this building, the place reminds me of his dynamic, charming younger self. It’s best to remember the departed at their peak.

In The Hollow Earth, I wrote about flying pigs whose bodies taper off to be like shrimp in the rear. I called them shrigs. One of the items Arpad left behind was a boar tusk cigar-cutter shaped exactly like a shrig.

I like riding around on Lake Geneva on these cheap water-busses called “mouettes.” Geneva has this huge “jet d’eau” fountain shooting high out of the lake.

A cutlery shop on the main street of Geneva holds a little Swiss Knife Museum. Behold one of the world’s largest Swiss knives.

The end of lake Geneva turns into the Rhone river, which runs west out of town, soon joined by the Arve, angling up from the south. the two meet at a little-frequented corner of town called Jonction (French for Junction). I was impressed by how clear and green and lovely is the Rhone (on the right). The Arve (on the left) — flowing from, ahem, France — is gray and it smells bad. The grayness is, actually, because it’s from the stony alps. But the stink is pollution.

I walked down to the Jonction this afternoon, remembering old times.

About twenty years ago, we were visiting here and I spent a day walking around Geneva. I was working on my novel The Hollow Earth then, and looking up at a flock of birds in the sky over the lake, maybe seagulls, I imagined a sea that floats in mid-air: the inspiration for my fictional “Umpteen Seas.”

Near the jet d'eau, a seagull’s wings mirror the arch of a stone pier. At the end of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, my man Eddie Poe describes the entrance to the Hollow Earth, with the birds eternally calling, “Teke-lili.”

Later that day, like today, I made my way down to the grassy bank of the Rhone.

The bridge and turbine building remind me of Half Life, especially with a couple on the bridge throwing rocks — or barrel-bombs — down into the river.

Lots of graffiti at the Jonction. The grassy bank where I remembered sitting to slip off my clothes for swimming and perhaps to make a note about the Umpteen Seas on my usual pocket-square of paper twenty years ago — the bank is covered with dog turds, packed in like an Escher tessellation, unspeakably foul.

Here's a link to a Geneva skate shop , quite a cool site with a skate video.

And then it was back to the USA. We stopped in holy Queens, NY, to visit our granddaughter.

In the evening I was lying on my back on the couch in my PJs, almost ready for sleep, and my daughter parked her baby on my chest, on my heart, just where our three children used to lie. The baby tossed a bit, raising her heavy sticky-skin head a few times, then settling in and dozing. I felt her as a field of energy, a glowing ingot. My granddaughter, how wonderful. Life is an ongoing pleasant surprise.

I’ll get back to Geneva-Budapest next week.

Yesterday we went to visit Rudy, Jr., in Oakland. He’s settling into a new place that has some nice built-in cupboards suitable for displaying such treasures as a (functional) rocket that he built.

We walked over to a farmer’s market near Grand Street. The Grand Lake movie theater marquee bore a telling comment about the Chimp’s inept response to the hurricaine in New Orleans. A lot of people in Oakland have relatives in New Orleans. Here's on on-the-spot blog about NO.

A guy in the farmer’s market was in fact selling crawfish, impressively lively and red, $5 a pound. So many lives to be bought so cheaply.

We saw a funny graffito in the alley behind the movie theater. Good coffee shop, good bookstore, seems like a good place to live.

We regrouped, then walked all the way around Merrit Lake, which is actually a dammed slough, with a free flow of ocean tide coming through.

Lots of wild geese around the lake.

All kinds of birds there.

The only ones inside the bird dome were some chickens.

It's risky being a chicken.

Nice reflection of a rectilinear building grid in the water, the squares turning into circles.