Welcome, Asimov’s Readers!
Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under writing | 2 Comments
I guess some people might visit after reading my story in the July 2008 Asimov’s SF, which has gone out in the mail (though I’m sure it isn’t on newsstands yet) titled, “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.” I hope you enjoyed it, though I guess if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have come here.
Anyway, welcome to my site, and feel free to have a look around if you like. A lot of my recent posts here are about current Korean political stuff, but if you dig, you can find all kinds of other stuff. If you’re like to find some tracks of me playing saxophone, pop over here.
In the sidebar, you can find links to more stories online (including the text and podcast of “Pahwakhe,” which was drafted in the same week of Clarion West, or my Greg Egan fanboy tribute “The Egan Thief” at Flurb), as well as lists of my forthcoming fiction… including another story in Asimov’s. My bio is here, and if you’d like to know more about “Lester Young…” I’ve got some background on when and why I wrote it here.
(To my regular readers, I’m going to leave this stickypost up for a while, as well as adding a link to the Fictionwise version in my sidebar under “Published Stories,” when it becomes available, for those who might want to check it out but don’t want to order the paper version.)
Just… Wow.
Posted on May 17, 2008
Filed Under pol | 3 Comments
Ellen Datlow linked this at Matthew Good’s site:
Wow.
Subscribe to Comments
Posted on May 16, 2008
Filed Under blogz | Leave a Comment
This is one of those little things I meant to install ages ago, but never got around to it. You can now subscribe to the comments section of a post when commenting, to receive notification when others comment or reply to you.
Forced Upgrade In Progress
Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under Korea, ubuntu | 2 Comments
I may not be blogging as much as usual for the next few days… I’m working on an upgrade of Ubuntu on my computer, and I hadn’t planned for it, or set aside time for it.
See, I was trying to install the Linux version of HWP (the Korean wordprocessor that gets the widest use in Korea, and which everyone else hates because that program’s proprietary format, .hwp, is the standard here, but other wordprocesses don’t handle it very well). I’m trying to install this because I’m suddenly in a position where I can’t just advise people to re-send the file in .doc or .rtf. These days, I need to be able to open, work on, and save files in .hwp format.
So I found a few (slightly different) tutorials, and just what do you think happened?
Oh yes, somehow it absolutely destroyed my installation of Ubuntu. I’m not even sure what got broken, but suddenly Synaptic, Firefox, and even the terminal interface wouldn’t load at all! It was like all I had left working was GUI, and that was, well… not enough.
Yes, yes, my installation was long ion the tooth anyway, version 6.06 and probably screwed up in several different ways by my having run Automatix — external devices were always mounting funny, for example — so I should have upgraded long ago, and while installing Ubuntu is far from a headache, I didn’t need even a few small extra tasks right now. Even better, the reams of data I backed up on one of my external drives mostly looks invisible to my new install of Ubuntu — or, rather, looked invisible to the new installation after I ruined it by trying again to install the HWP app.
At least the files on that external hard drive are visible from the installation of Linux Mint I’m running on my smaller, throw-it-around laptop that I bring on trips and so on, though. Nothing was lost, indeed, not very much data at all: I’m a great data packrat, and I back up the most important files in ways that would seem paranoid to anyone who’s never lost the archive of all his writing or photos over the last N years.
So now, it’s just a case of getting an install of Ubuntu 8.04 running and back up to normal. You know, so I can input Korean text, view Youtube videos, play DVDs, process RAW images, and so on. The lovely thing about installing Ubuntu is that it takes only a few minutes. The unlovely thing is the work it takes to get back to normal is somewhat more argh, you haven’t gotten around to setting up a separate partition for the /home directory.
(Even though I have to say, it’s getting better… a few versions ago, I had a hell of a struggle just to get the monitor to display anything other than horrific jagged lines and guck! These days, it’s the luxury stuff one has to work to get… and not all that hard, I’ll admit, except, of course, for the blasted HWP app!)
But all in all, I’m feeling relatively unscathed… it’s just my time that I’m feeling short on at the moment, what with all kinds of school stuff to do or get done or start, and some writing stuff I was just getting into, and so on.
Ah well, it’s for the best… otherwise I might never have gotten around to upgrading!
UPDATE: Aha! And it was all so easy… once I found the right instructions.
I’m not sure if the crazy symbolic links I set up before reinstalling it helped, but there’s a repo you can add that’s listed on the page linked just above. It’s a Gutsy repo, but it works for Hardy Heron too. Now I can open HWP files in Linux…
That’s enough for today. Tomorrow, I’ll install Abiword, Nabi (or some other input device software to allow Korean input), some Roman and Korean fonts, get the multimedia working, set up few other necessary applications, and… well, and then we’ll see. I still want to migrate my /home directory to a separate partition, and it seems like now is a good time to do it. Or, maybe not now, but sometime on the weekend, perhaps.
So, Then… aka Squee
Posted on May 13, 2008
Filed Under writing | Leave a Comment
The subscriber issues of Asimov’s July ‘08 issue are out, and apparently there’s a review of my story in it coming in Locus… I’ll be waiting a while for my copy, but the gist is here. And it’s been a springboard to at least one discussion of jazz SF already at the Asimov’s board. Is it impolitic to jump in on such a discussion? I would like to inform Redmarvel that the fate of the cowboys will not always be a mystery, if I get my way… but wouldn’t want to make people feel like they can’t bash the story if they wish!
new free music
Posted on May 12, 2008
Filed Under music | 2 Comments
Free, and DRM-free, music:
- The new Nine Inch Nails album, “the slip”.
- via BoingBoing, hip-hop/bluegrass mashup madness: Gangstagrass
Worth checking out…
Could I Get a Class To Do This?
Posted on May 11, 2008
Filed Under esl & other teaching, books read 2008 | Leave a Comment
I wonder. Saw a link on Boing-Boing for the product of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, a graphic novel titled Shake Girl which is online for free here. Read it in one sitting. True story. Very sad. Good stuff.
Make me wonder whether I could get my students to do something that good in a semester. Too bad I don’t have an elementary writing course anymore, it’d be a cool project. Perhaps I’ll pitch it for next semester, though I think it’s too late to get approval for such a thing, and this is my last semester here.
keep looking »
