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Two new Fantasy Audio Books coming! WOOT!

I am very happy to see two new fantasy audiobooks releasing soon!

The first one I heard about is Nathan Lowell's Ravenwood. The URL for his website is http://www.lammaswood.com/

Here's a blurb about Ravenwood:

Tanyth Fairport makes one last pilgrimage in her quest to learn all she can about the herbs and medicinal plants of the world before settling down to write her magnum opus. Her journey is interrupted when she stops to help a small village and learns that much of what she knows of the world may not be quite as it seems.
This is not another science fiction novel set in the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, but a fantasy set in a whole new world where magic is madness and adventure isn’t something you seek out.

Also there is Paulette Jaxton's The Empress Sword which is at http://empresssword.com/

Here's the blurb about Empress Sword:

A Prince, a Dragon & a Magic Sword – all the elements of a classic adventure story.

Unfortunately for Prince Aster of Caledon the dragon in question may not be the evil beast he thinks it is, and the magic sword might not even let the adventurous young prince touch it. When Aster discovers the price he must pay to save his kingdom, he’ll have to make a choice no self-respecting adventure book hero would even consider.

This is not your father’s epic fantasy story, but it might be you’re cousin Trudy’s.

The Empress Sword, it’s Eragon meets Twelfth Night.

I look forward to listening to you both!

Happy Birthday to my youngest child, Genevieve

She's a child no more. 18! Adult in the eyes of the law! Amazing!

Well, I am very happy to know she's alive and hope that she's having a Happy Return Upon the Day.

She is the youngest of my children, and now all three of them have passed that magical 18 number.

Congrats, Genevieve!

Happy birthday, Cynthia!

My darling love, Cynthia Armistead, has her birthday today. Happy birthday sweetness!

eBooks, Amazon and otherwise

I have just finished reading all "The Song of Ice and Fire" books published to date. They were excellent. George RR Martin does an incredible job of building a world, peopling it with characters both fair and foul, and telling a big story using scenes that build on each other over time. Hints are dropped, plots are planted, story seeds that bloom in blossoms both beautiful and terrible. These are adult-level fantasy stories; there is corruption, the morality is typically gray, and a character you hate may turn out to be someone you like, then someone you hate again.

That is no surprise: I read a lot. The surprise is this:

If I had not had the opportunity to read these books in a digital format, I very much doubt I would have ever finished them.

There's a lot of people who swear they'd never read a digital book of any kind, in any format. I read the Song of Ice and Fire series on a ipod Touch, which is a device roughly the size of an iPhone. The screen was not very large, but due to the awesome work done by the people who put together the Amazon Kindle iPhone app, I could easily read the words. Each screen was a tiny amount of an entire "page" but I could page through the little screens very, very easily.

The best thing about the reading, though, was this: my book was always with me. In line at the supermarket, the bank, on the train, for my lunch break at work, laying down at the end of the day, whenever I had a few minutes I could quickly and easily pick up exactly where I left off and read.

I heartily recommend the Kindle app, because it takes an already useful item (the ipod Touch in this case) and makes it even more useful and entertaining. Don't knock it before you try it!

SambearCast with Gary Motley

Welcome to a long-delayed SambearCast! I had the distinct pleasure to sit and talk with Gary Motley, an accomplished and puissant Jazz Pianist who has played on stage with Brubeck, produced an album tribute to Oscar Petersen called "Renaissance" and happens to also teach at Emory University. He impressed me with the way he can pack knowledge into a paragraph with no effort whatsoever, and I really enjoyed the hour I spent talking to him.

This interview was for an article at Leon Dale's website, so I invite you to go over there, see wonderful photographs of his work and read my article, then if you have time go deep and listen to the podcast. It's a "you are there" sort of experience; sit with Gary and I at a coffee shop across from Emory and have some fun listening to what we chatter on about.

 

 SambearCast - Sam interviews Gary Motley [50:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Does my soda fountain need to be this complex?

I encountered this soda fountain yesterday in my regular travels. When I first went to fill my cup, I selected Coke, then Cherry Coke. It said, "Choose another selection." Um. OK. Why did you offer me the icon for cherry coke if you don't have it? I understand that when the analog Cherry Coke fountain runs out of syrup or whatever, it's over, you just have to taste it to know. But at least I recognize that. In this case, I'm sitting there thinking "OK, if you show me the icon, darnit, I want to be able to use the icon."

The soda fountain person spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to not only refill the cherry flavor cartridge but also how to make the machine realize that, while it was sleeping, the cherry cartridge had been replaced. This was a little harder than it might seem to be.

One of the soda brands offered on the screen is "Dasani." Dasani is "water." Dasani is actually specially filtered water, right? Do they have a special water filter in the machine, or is this really just tap water? I asked the guy, and he wouldn't say, his eyes got all glassy and he just sort of wandered off.

I can predict what's going to happen here. Eventually they will stop buying flavor cartridges, and eventually people will have to hunt around five or six screens to find even the main brand of drink they're looking for. This is fine because it is the way of things.

But it is kind of nifty looking, and I got a chance to see the operating system. I think they are using a linux backend on an embedded XHTML-based front end but don't quote me on that.

I do know that clicks are being counted. So, in a while, Coca-Cola will have market research live, direct from tens of thousands of locations, as to what people actually prefer to drink given their druthers.

For myself, I'd rather just have Cherry Coke. And I did, eventually, once the machine realized that it was cherry-full again.

It didn't taste like Cherry Coke, which is a bit of a blended flavor. It tasted like regular coke with some kind of generic cherry flavor added.

Oh, and by the way, somebody needs to tell the designer of this thing that the ice flows down into the trough and then out onto the floor and gets all over everything. This is suboptimal for people who don't want to slip and fall.

Ah well, at least its innovative!

Happy birthday Rowan!

My son, Rowan, has a birthday today. It's been a long day, so I'm glad I get to post this.

Rowan, I hope you're celebrating tonight. Happy birthday, I'm glad you're in the world.

At Dragon*Con!

Here's a little video I just made this morning!

Sam at Dragon*Con 2009 from Sam Chupp on Vimeo.

Here let me get that for you…

I can define this alert for you, MARTA.

MARTA was supposed to be free. Back when it was first created, the idea was that you should be able to waltz on to the train / bus combo and waltz off without paying a red cent.

That changed. The fare hikes have been coming throughout the years, and now this October 1st, MARTA claims they're going to go up to $2.00 a shot.

This is after they posted PROFITS over the last two years. This is after they just launched a brand new website (the "System Alert" function of which is...um...not working yet?)

I'm alerted. I'm alerted that someone is playing power politics - I don't know who. I'm alerted that, yet again, poor people are going to be shouldering the bulk of the burden to keep the roads clear for the expensive gas guzzlers.

So much for the Green Economy. The only color green at work here is that Dollar Bill shaded color. It doesn't matter that it's a better idea to put your money into mass transit, INCREASE service, LOWER fares than it is to BUILD MORE ROADS.

I just don't understand.

Why is MARTA quoting the fact that they got back-up money from the stimulus package as a means of explaining why they are raising their rates? That is a complete smoke and mirrors argument.

Here's why your rates are going up:

1.) Transportation costs are going up because of the cost of oil, and MARTA hasn't reinvested in enough infrastructure to cut down on the costs over the long haul by switching to electricity and other alternative fuels.

2.) The State Legislature couldn't give two figs for MARTA - they see it as an Atlanta city problem, not as a state problem.

We've gone so far away from the original vision of MARTA: a free transportation system for everybody. If we funded MARTA like we fund our schools, then nobody would have to pay and there would be posh velvet seats on every bus and working elevators and escalators on every platform.

Where are our priorities, in a bad economic time? They shouldn't be "Make it harder on people who can't afford / choose not to contribute to our growing bad air / carbon problem."

Leon Dale Photographer calls out the Goblins

I just got an awesome boost from Leon Dale Photographer. He hired local writer Janean Brown to do an interview and an article for him, and did all the photography for the article himself. The result was quite salutory!

Good thing the goblins were fed before I arrived!

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