ThinkingSkull.com

As if denial-of-service, viruses, and spyware weren’t enough. Now comes ‘ransom-ware,’ a malicious program that encrypts your files, then demands money for the key to decrypt them. Reports are popping up all over the place about it, but that’s just eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-vil.

Once upon a time, someone thought that “slowing down” saved lives; getting from here to there was merely a secondary concern. Law enforcement discovered that lowering the speed limits by five or ten miles an hour was a great way to increase ticket revenue (no longer a ‘conspiracy’ anymore, merely an admitted fact). “Road rage” has since become a 21st century watchword because society isn’t slowing down and drivers are fed up with those who can’t keep up (minimum speed 45 mph in a 70 is legal?) Move over, dang nabbit!

Now, FINALLY, people who think 45 mph is safe in the left passing lane (if only to slow their fellow travelers down), their days are numbered. Failing to yield to allow faster drivers by on the left is a ticketable offense, and in Colorado and (yay!) Florida, they’re enforcing it. If you want to drive on weekdays like its Sunday on the freeway, do it in the right lane (it’s the ‘right’ lane for YOU, after all!) Check out this article for more details, but all I can say is hooray.

I am holding a copy of the Preview Edition, still warm from CafePress… and it’s actually better quality than I imagined they’d do. Ah, opening that first shipping crate and smelling that “new book” smell! All of this, the entire idea since CafePress said they’d start beta testing print-on-demand (pod) creation of books, all of it has come to fruition! Happy me, happy me, happy me…! I go now.

So while putting the finishing touches on the manuscript for the Preview Edition of Kindling Moon, I attempt to compile the final version into a *pdf only to discover… it won’t work. Half the pages came out blank, as if the compiler just decided not to use them. Oh well, the program was old, but it’s what I had, so on to Plan “B.” The text and pictures are still finished and intact, after all.

Plan “B” consisted of using Microsoft Word and using a distiller/compiler to turn the original text document into a publishable file. I found a recommended one by 8848Soft.com, loaded it, purchased the shareware key, pushed the button and… it still didn’t work! On to Plan “C”: load the software on a different computer and see if anything changes. It didn’t; apparently, it just doesn’t work.

Plan “D” consisted of a free Adobe.com feature that will let you compile documents, but after 5 of them the charge you (or hope you’ll buy their software). And it worked! Unfortunately, the last page’s graphic seemed to find its way into the second-to-last page text, so I adjusted and did it again. Same problem, but now I became suspicious. Could it be that the final page graphic somehow exceeded a preset limit, border, or something else? I reduce the graphic size again; it compiled perfectly.

Back to Plan “B.” It worked! 8848Soft’s MS Word compiler did the trick (after fixing the mystery margins). So for anyone needing to turn their *docs into *pdfs, here’s a low-cost solution as long as you accept the limitations. Kindling Moon’s Rulebook & Realmbook Preview Edition is finished and ready for inspection.

If time travel is possible, and if someone were to have a convention for time travelers to show up and meet, you’d never technically need more than one, right? After all, if you know when it was and where it was, you could attend whenever and wherever you are BECAUSE you’re a time traveler.

This first and only time traveler convention was the brainchild of a trust of MIT students close to graduation. Response from non-traveler folk has been so overwhelming that only those who’ve RSVPed already will be permitted to attend. Due to regulations at MIT, no television cameras will be around to capture possibly the single largest event thus far in human history if a time traveler DOES actually show up.

Unfortunately, knowing how the government already intends to treat alien life when it finally shows itself is cause enough NOT to attend anything as publicized as this. But at least the kids have their hearts in the right place; my buddy from the Atlantis says scientists will have to genetically move the hearts of future generations a little more to the right to better protect it beneath the sternum due to increased radiations levels causing mutations.

Details (for attending time travelers only): May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC), (events start at 8:00pm), East Campus Courtyard, MIT, 3 Ames St. Cambridge, MA 02142, 42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)